Certainty and Fragility: reassessing the role of automatically generated aids to the making process

This paper considers the role of automatically generated guides, supports and other material that are intended to aid the making process. Increasingly, work and even daily life are supported by systems that automatically create text, lines, images and other forms as an aid for numerous types of activity. These include the auto-suggestions of search engines and messaging apps, and the guides and supports generated by graphics and 3D modelling software. This study focuses on the role of these assistants in the production of media artefacts. It revaluates the temporary creations which support creative processes but which are rarely considered at great length beyond their originally intended purpose. This paper will discuss how a repurposed 3D printer has been used to reinvent the support material generated by 3D slicer software as drawings and images in their own right. In doing so it describes how the transition from digital proposition to analog realisation often traverses a line between certainty and fragility. It will reflect on what this might reveal about the perceived relationship between human and machine, and between the manmade and the mechanically produced. This in turn invites a reassessment and rebalancing of these roles.