Imagine being able to manufacture (almost) anything from your home – or at your office; from ceramic pottery to a custom iPod case. An upcoming show at the Klein Gallery at the Science Center will feature three dimensional works of art and design created from digital data.

The FAB Show will feature several digital fabricators or 'Fabbers' - small, self-contained factories that can make almost anything, right on your desktop. Fabbers use 3-D printing technology to create solid objects from digital data. The FAB Show will feature two open-source Fabber projects Fab@Home and MakerBot, along with artists, designers and researchers who are currently using this technology including Sabin+Jones LabStudio, Mark Ganter and Bathsheba Grossman. Throughout the run of this exhibition there will be live demonstrations and scheduled workshops for community members to interact with this emerging technology.

Fab@Home: The goal of the Fab@Home project is to offer an open-source, low-cost, personal Solid Freeform Fabrication (SSF) kit. The aim of this project is to put SFF technology into the hands of curious, inventive, and entrepreneurial citizens. The standard version of Fab@Home’s Freeform fabricator – or "fabber" – is about the size of a microwave oven. It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. “We are trying to get this technology into as many hands as possible," says Evan Malone, co-creator of the Fab@Home project. "The kit is designed to be as simple as possible."  Malone has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University. Fab@Home is currently being adopted into secondary and university curricula in the USA and the UK, and has individual users worldwide.
Fab@Home has recently received a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award and has written about in numerous publications including Wired, Newsweek, and Popular Science Magazines. http://fabathome.org/

MakerBot: “Start the 3-D Printer Revolution from your living room” is the slogan for MakerBot, which creates open source robot and 3-D Printer kits that allow users to transform digital designs into physical objects. The kits are modular, modifiable, and built to be hacked. MakerBot has been written about in Wired Magazine and numerous blogs. MakerBot was founded by Bre Pettis, Zach Smith and Adam Mayer of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective with a shared space located in downtown Brooklyn, NY. NYC Resistor members meet regularly to share knowledge, hack on projects together and build community. http://www.makerbot.com

Bathsheba Grossman’s artwork is primarily mathematical in nature, often depicting intricate patterns or mathematical oddities. Grossman creates sculptures using computer-aided design and three-dimensional modeling, with metal printing technology to produce sculpture in bronze and stainless steel. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally, featured in Time and Wired Magazines and on the television series Numb3rs and Heroes. For her MFA, Grossman studied Robert Engman at the University of Pennsylvania. Grossman lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA and Boston, MA. http://www.bathsheba.com/

Mark Ganter is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle and lead researcher at the Solheim Rapid Manufacturing Laboratory. His research activities focus on solid modeling design and the development of solid modeling for layered manufacturing. Ganter is a longtime practitioner of 3-D printing along with an early user of the Fab@Home platform. Ganter became frustrated with the high cost of commercial materials and began experimenting with his own formulas. He and his students gradually developed a home-brew approach, creating a proprietary mix with artists' ceramic powder blended with sugar and maltodextrin, a nutritional supplement. Ganter is an accomplished glass artist, working primarily with blown glass. 

Sabin+Jones LabStudio is a hybrid research and design unit initiated by Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones in 2007. Sabin+Jones LabStudio is based within the Institute for Medicine & Engineering and the School of Design the University of Pennsylvania. Within the Sabin+Jones LabStudio, architects, mathematicians, materials scientists and cell biologists are actively collaborating to develop, analyze and abstract dynamic, biological systems through the generation and design of new tools and new approaches for modeling complexity and visualizing large datasets. The real and virtual world that LabStudio occupies has already offered radical new insights into generative and ecological design within architecture, and it is providing new ways of seeing and measuring how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease. Overall, the mission of LabStudio is to produce new modes of thinking, working and creating in design and biomedicine through the modeling of dynamic, multi-dimensional systems with experiments in biology, applied mathematics, fabrication and material construction.  http://www.sabin-jones.com

The Esther M. Klein Art Gallery hours:
Monday-Saturday
9:00am - 5:00pm

Free to Public/Wheelchair Access