IMAGE TO OBJECT

This ongoing series of software and sculptural projects began development in late 2017 as part of my participation in the Digital Stone Project, an international artist residency and research program hosted by Garfagnana Innovazione in the Apuan Alps of northern Italy. Nestled near the marble quarries of Gramolazzo, the program offers artists access to 7-axis robotic milling machines, traditional hand-finishing tools, and deep historical continuity with centuries of stone carving.

My work at DSP emerged from a long-standing inquiry into the transformation of images into objects. Drawing inspiration from early motion studies by Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, I developed custom software tools to transcode found footage and animated GIFs into spatial data. This computational process allowed me to generate sculptural forms that freeze movement into mineral stillness, extruding frames of flight into spiraling geometries of turbulence and pause.

The resulting marble sculptures — Red Tumbler (2018) and Spanish Little Friar Tumbler (2019) — materialize the ghost of a pigeon in mid-plummet, caught between the analytic gaze of motion capture and the embodied tradition of chisel and mallet. These works operate at the intersection of generative design, procedural aesthetics, and conceptual art, where computation is not a tool of control but a collaborator in chance and emergence.

Rooted in conceptual drawing traditions (from Sol LeWitt to John Cage), the sculptures were both meticulously planned and deliberately open to accident. The process involved translating animated sequences into volumetric data, refining those forms via CAD/CAM workflows, and then negotiating their translation into stone with engineers and fabricators at the DSP lab. The works were rough-carved with industrial robotic arms, then finished by hand — allowing both digital precision and tactile improvisation to leave their trace.

The residency foregrounded collaboration: between artists and technicians, between historical craft and computational logic, between matter and meaning. It reinforced a central theme in my practice — exploring how images behave when asked to become things, and how tools built for industry (or war, or surveillance) might be repurposed toward more interesting ends.