In the beginning there was the word. And then the word was printed. And that’s what printing was all about. Today, 3D printing can make rocket engines, and soon, human livers. But how about a retro trip back in time to interact with the past to change the present? No, not to stop advanced Sentinels from being developed via Mystique’s DNA (the new Xmen movie really is ace, btw) but to 3D print the type sets used by the old school printing press for a bit of a blast from the past. It’s been done, via Blender, everyone’s favourite confusing 3D software. Here’s how.
At school I was taught that the world’s first printing press was the Gutenberg press in the sixteenth century. The press soon changed the world just as much as the internet has changed the world today. Rather than reading solely being a pastime of Princes and monks, information was transmitted in a more rapid way, with an ever-increasing amount of people able to receive information that they would not have previously been able to acquire. Knowledge is power as Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the artist) once said.
The internet avails vast amounts of information in a far more rapid medium. According to Wikipedia, the teachers at my school were wrong, and the first printing didn’t happen in Europe, but in China:
’The world’s first known movable type printing technology was invented and developed in China by the Han Chinese printer Bi Sheng between the years 1041 and 1048. In Korea, the movable metal type printing technique was invented in the early thirteenth century during the Goryeo Dynasty. However, the Goryeo Dynasty of Korea printed Jikgi by using the similar method about 72 years earlier than Gutenberg, and Jikgi is the world’s first press-printing material that is extant. In the West, the invention of an improved movable type mechanical printing technology in Europe is credited to the German printer Johannes Gutenberg in 1450’
Just as the print press enabled the first wave of transmittance of information in large volumes en mass, the internet has accented this process massively. And, now, 3D printing combines printing and digital information to produce a phenomena that could again create a significant paradigm shift. Just as the internet has created a method of storing in the cloud, meaning Project Gutenberg can have 50,000 free books for anyone anywhere to read on their hand-held device – a phenomenal consideration by contrast to the physical process of handling a cumbersome book and it’s wonderful but now mediocre information storage capacity – a pen drive can now hold 50,000 3D printable objects for anyone anywhere to 3D print.
Now, the Printmaking Department at Nyckelviksskolan has created letterpress type with a home desktop 3D printer for an interesting juxtaposition of old and new, digital and physical, two dimensional print and three dimensional printing. The process is interesting to watch, especially given some of the possible artistic connotations that could be conceived from the work. To cite a quote from the Blender blog, Anders Gudmundson at Nyckelviksskolan says:
‘Reinventing Gutenberg with modern computer technology. Letterpress type is getting harder to come by – can this be a way to recreate block and lead type by using digital matrices? This project started as a “proof of concept” at the Printmaking Department at Nyckelviksskolan this spring.The first 3D printed types were demonstrated at a 3Dprintmaking party/workshop held 21 May with participants from the FFH (General Art, Crafts and Design) and BOG (Graphic Design and Illustration) classes.‘
I end my words here and hand over to the video, which could also be taken as inspiration for some interesting lettertype printing maker projects from 3D printed typeset.
