NHG: I'm essentially a pornographer

[bunnymendelbaum]

I'm making a tactile 3d version of this photograph for a museum client. Stuff I do often looks phallic, but this one is killing me with the exploding white foam. I've been laughing all day working on it. ETA: Even funnier to think people will be rubbing their hands all over "exploring" it.

[mrs.jacinthe]

Awkward.

Will it have the water/foam in the tactile version?

[bunnymendelbaum]

Oct 28, 2014 13:09:09 GMT -5 mrs.jacinthe said:

Awkward.

Will it have the water/foam in the tactile version?

Yes. I'm trying to figure out how to represent that right now. Probably a bunch of 3d radiating lines and dashes and dots.

The finished version will have the photo printed over the tactile version, so it will look less obviously phallic IRL at least.

[bunnymendelbaum]

Oct 28, 2014 13:44:34 GMT -5 nursecramer said:

Interesting. Is it truly 3-D, as in a 360 degree view, or is it textured 2-D?

It is not a freestanding sculpture. It's more like a relief. 1/2" thick.

[bunnymendelbaum]

Oct 28, 2014 14:06:17 GMT -5 nursecramer said:

Oct 28, 2014 13:59:48 GMT -5 bunnymendelbaum said:

It is not a freestanding sculpture. It's more like a relief. 1/2" thick.

I don't know what materials you're working with or your parameters are, but when I taught blind students, we had to make tactile graphs, so we'd use different textures where we wanted to show colors. Like one section would be sculpted to be striated and another would be undulating. That allowed us to still express dimension and depth because you could scale the texture appropriately (e.g. larger waves vs smaller waves).

This sounds like a cool project. Will you be able to show us the final result?

We use a 3d milling machine on acrylic and cover it with a thermoformed printed vinyl. I've done a ton of these, although we just revamped our process to allow greater depth and more detail. This one just has me laughing because its SO phallic!

Were you making collages or swell paper? Or something else?

Right now I'm just doing a rendering for the proposal, but I'll share the final installation when it is done.

[dr.girlfriend]

lol, my coworker has that in his office.  I think he means it to represent resilience, not -- you know, ejaculation.  ;-) 

[bunnymendelbaum]

So here's the rendering proposal image I did and the photo I had to work from. In rendering: original photo on the left, new tactile on the right.