From Smithsonian Magazine's Design Decoded blog:
The titular draughtsman looks through his perspective machine in this still from Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract
3D printers and digital mapping services are making it drastically
easier to produce infinite identical copies of anything, for better or
worse, for humanitarian or for destructive purposes. A digital map can
be accessed by anyone with a smartphone or computer and a replica of
Michelangelo’s David can be made at home just as easily as an assault rifle.
While the relatively new technology of 3D printing is proving popular
with designers, fabricators and the general public, it hasn’t yet
reached the ubiquity of the home printer. But it only seems to be a
matter of time until desktop fabrication is as common as desktop
publishing. The technology is getting cheaper and more efficient every
year, and even though 3D printing has barely been established, engineers
are already hard at work on 4D printing (the fourth dimension is time!). One ambitious company has recently caused a sensation on Kickstarter with its prototype for a 3D printing pen.
These latest drawing and modeling technologies are fascinating, but
when did the idea of 3D printing originate? What are some of the
earliest drawing and fabrication “machines”? To find the answer we go
back to the days before copiers or even carbon paper, back to the
Renaissance, to a man who invented digital reproduction in the original
sense of the word.
Leon Battista Alberti
was an Italian philosopher, scientist, architect and all around
polymath who lived during the 15th century. Basically, he was your
prototypical Renaissance man. Alberti is perhaps one of the most
important and influential creative figures to come out of the
Renaissance, although he is one of the less widely known. He believed
that art and science were united by basic principles of mathematics, and
among his many accomplishments Alberti defined the principles of
geometric construction known today as central perspective and invented
techniques for producing identical copies of paintings, sculptures, and
even buildings without the aid of mechanical devices such as
the printing press. This desire for a method of creating identical
copies came out of Alberti’s frustration with the inadequacies and
inevitable mistakes that result from manual reproduction techniques. In
his excellent book, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (which I’m currently enjoying and have previously mentioned on Design Decoded), architectural theorist and historian Mario Carpo describes these techniques as “digital” reproductions.
“Alberti tried to counter the failings of analog images
by digitizing them, in the etymological sense: replacing pictures with a
list of numbers and a set of computation instructions, or algorithms,
designed to convert a visual image into a digital file and then recreate
a copy of the original picture when needed.”
By reducing images to carefully calculated coordinates and
documenting the method by which the original was created, Alberti
ensured that anyone could produce copies that were exactly identical to
his original work. The numeric manuscripts, which were easy to copy
without error, represented a type of Renaissance file transfer.
Albrecht
Dürer’s drawing “Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman” (1525),
depicting a perspective machine similar to that described by Alberti in
his treatise De Pictura (image: wikimedia commons)
Alberti’s most famous invention dealing with reproduction is the
perspective machine, which is still used by artists today. The setup he
designed for transcribing images from reality looks something like a
modern Battleship game board....MUCH MORE
