Makerbot's artist-in-residence

The homebrew 3D printing magnates at Makerbot (proprietors of the Thingiverse catalog of printable objects and the open Makerbot 3D printers) have just hired an artist-in-residence. Marius Watz is a sculptor, who says "My goal for my MakerBot residency is to produce a set of models for my upcoming exhibition at ROM for Kunst og Arkitektur in Oslo next month. As part of that process I will be developing a new Processing library for 3D model building, to be released as Open Source along with a series of models I'll publish on Thingiverse in the MakerBot spirit of openness. You can already get a preview on Flickr, I can't wait to add more!"

Makerbot have a second artist-in-residence lined up, and are open to submissions from future potential candidates for the post.

First MakerBot Artist-In-Residence: Marius Watz (via Beyond the Beyond)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Marius Watz

Awesome post, happy to be featured. I’d hasten to say I’m not a sculptor, though. Life is hard enough without angering an established group of professionals who are serious about their hard-earned credentials.

A better description would be “artist working with generative software processes”. It might not be very snappy, but no artist is just “a painter” or “sculptor” these days.
Anonymous

This is incredible, I just bought one for myself with the goal of it helping my architecture goals, but I’m really glad to see other steps towards the makerbot being useful for more artistic functions.
Methusedalot

Marius Watz is clearly an over flowing fount of creative energy. I mean those shapes, those forms! It really stretches the imagination, and to think that soon anybody will be able to do this! We live in an age of wonders.
nutate

I wuz up in the botcave bein’ all like “LOLWUT, 3D Printing, WOAH”

My guide was like “Yeah, pretty cool, huh?”

I saw some of these pictured objects and I was all “WOAH [again]”

He was like “Keep it down man.”

Then I was all, “this place looks pretty efficient as a small business.”

Then I met some of his coworkers whom I had seen on their interesting ustream TV webcasts, I was all: “LOLBBQ, you guys are funny on teh interwebvids”

They were all “are you a 3D printer guy?”

I was all “LOLZ I wish, I ain’t got the scratch right now, but like I’ve done a bit of 3D rapid prototyping here and there. One of these days I’ll get a thing-o-matic, for sure”

They were like “surrrrre.”

Then I was like, “YO!!!!!!! I’m out!”

A month later I ordered an Arduino UNO from them. Sure, it’s not a thing-o-matic, but yeah.

True story.