From the Virtual to the Material: The re-Appearance of the Art Object

Artists, designers and craft makers are currently exploring new materials and processes such as 'Accumulated Printing' within their practice to bring forth new forms and extend ideas. Often this is through a hybrid dialogic process of a maker's thoughts translated into code in the virtual world for production in the real world. Resulting in unique crafted objects created without the 'touch' of the hand-made, while encapsulating craft-thinking in the machine-made. This real-virtual-real approach is further streamlined, and without the craft signature, when working in shared virtual space. As artists are moving objects across the virtual from the real and back into solid form, so cyberspace gains a foothold in the real through materialisation and a return to the virtual. The second life platform is relatively new and still under development, but there are a number of artists beginning to explore the possibilities of this virtual world outside its commercial premise. The phenomena of the re-materialisation of the art object will be presented through the shift in art-thinking since mid-last century, as evidenced by Lucy Lippard and derived from the impact of earlier art. The paper will review the current situation via contemporary understandings, and where new technologies have allowed for a re-materialisation of the art object, exampling the work of artists such as Intersculpt, Michael Eden and those in the Kritical Works in SL II exhibition. This re-positioning of the art object allows a return to the initial formative conceptual framework, and offers a way through to a cutting-edge form of post conceptual art practice.