What I find interesting about this is that the motivation is "backwards", that the whole technique apparently alleviates some of the size limitations currently associated with any particular 3D printer, and was not necessarily built around artistic motivations as the video might imply.

Also, (and this is very common in many technologies or techniques), it does still have limitations in the way the jewelry makers or fashion designers or artists can use it (compared to what they can probably imagine). They won't be able to envision absolutely anything and use this technique to create it (the product it creates is conceptually a 2 dimensional surface, the only choice of cells ls triangular, etc.).

The Kinematics video is great. Very clean and crisp. Cool shapes. As far as I can tell though, ever since people invented hinges, we've been building within the conceptual framework of what they're calling 4D. Using their logic as a point of departure, my bedroom door is 4D because it is customizable. I can open and close it. I can even crack it. Really though, we've been 3D printing objects with hinges - both live and dead - since days of underoos. Regardless, the Kinematics video is still effective because it at least demonstrates a consideration at a systemic level of how one piece creates the many as well as the inevitable whole. But if all it gives us is pretentious jewelry worn by a bunch of skanks then I'm out.

I would have loved to see a version by which I can send an electric pulse through my dress that holds it in a particular form. I have a button on the sleeve with options. One is 'pillow', one is 'bathroom', one is 'running for the bus', and one is 'shit it's hot outside, make this mofo a mini-skirt'. But then I ask how useless have my own hands become? At least then though, my dress comes with a concept from a designer about how I should live in it - not just 'figure it out for yourself lady'. But don't be fooled. Your dress still has grubby authorship hands all over it because, after all, you still live in it's world.

If you'll indulge me on a rant about customization here (in terms of design), there's a utopian idea out there that if we can just define the parameters for people, and let them fill the rest in themselves, our individual and even collective lives would be more complete. Truth is, most people do not change or want to change their environments. They either work with what is given to them or change it just once to suit and leave it be. How many times have you rearranged the furniture in your open concept apartment? Me neither. I guess you could say that the "change it just once to suit" is what it's all about. This might be true at mass market, but that isn't ever how it's sold. Complete renewel and infinite reinvention is what they say. Constant's New Babylon promised nothing short of alternative life experience and the achievement of a self-fulfilled reality - free from 'bourgeois shackles'. Mies Van der Rohe's less is more mantra gave us the beautiful shell with which to fill of our own interior. We all called it Modernism. But despite it's enduring optimism, it left us nothing practical with which to hang our hat. Through all of this, what I'm attempting to articulate is that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. The black swans are dead. Context is king. Fuck, We. Need. Eachother. Your custom whatever doesn't mean shit unless it has the rest of our whatevers to compare itself too. Everything is everything. Peace out in the one three. Now, where'd my drink go?