Tobias Klein: “Metamorphosis or Confrontation” with Digital Craftsmanship

Digital craftsmanship seems to contradict the very notion of craftsmanship, which implies creations by hand and stresses the relationship between tools, materials, and the craftsman’s skillset. By contrast, digital evokes virtual images, software, and automated machines. Yet, developments of new tools employed by artists and designers increasingly provoke this conventional separation. Architect and artist Tobias Klein has devoted much of his career to destabilizing this dichotomy, utilizing 3D printing in addition to CAD/CAM technologies, or computer-aided design and manufacturing, in his practice. 

The dimly lit room that followed held a pair of screens mounted on each side of a free-standing wall, projecting a choreographed virtual reality (VR) experience, Augmented Landscape (2020). On one side, seated participants tread through a barren dystopian terrain facing the sea; on the opposing screen was a nocturnal view of the same landscape but facing the mountains. In both scenarios, viewers encounter and interact with a floating, peculiarly formed mask-like entity. The photorealistic VR surroundings ultimately collapse into black-and-white renderings, exposing the settings as digital illusions, while large mirrors that appear at the end reveal to participants that they themselves are the masked creatures. The masks borrow design elements from headpieces of Cantonese opera, and through embarking on the VR journey, participants unknowingly become actors of the performance, insinuating a world where illusions permeate realities.

The idea of change was particularly pronounced in the third room. The Invisible Human—Abdomen (2013)—a lit incubator lined with dense crystal formations—was exhibited as an interactive installation in 2013 at Industry Gallery in Washington, DC, where attached infra-red sensors detecting the proximity of viewers generated heat to induce crystallization. The crystals grown from that month-long display envelope a 3D printed, digitally sectioned MRI scan of a human abdomen on the incubator, influencing the final shape of the work. In this way, the artificial crystals cultivated from the earlier public interactions instil life into the inanimate object, contrary to the natural and often harmful crystallization that occurs in the human body, such as the formation of kidney stones. Nearby, Melted Proportions I–VI (2019) comprises six 3D printed resin sculptures—each appearing more eroded than the last—that portray a gradual mutation of Leonardo da Vinci’s polyhedron into a spherical, tangled form. 

The conflating of old and new craftsmanship was all the more evident in the final room, where antique Qing-dynasty wooden and lacquered tables served as stands for the artist’s ornamental glass objects, fused with digitally printed tendril-like structures. Resembling primordial mitosis, the blown-glass vessels, a form of analogue craft, were cut into two before being 3D scanned and fitted with the polymer constructs. In this space, Klein articulates the amalgamation of materials as well as the combination of traditional and digital techniques, challenging dichotomic readings of the two.