Becky Shaw, Independent
Title of Paper: ‘Getting Real’
Stream Repetition and Technology-Abstract Only

 The following paper describes a project I undertook within a University engineering department and explores the problems of replication, the conflicting tensions between old and new, nostalgia and progress, and the relationship between academia and industry as two sites of commodity production. At the same time, the work questions the relationship between art and engineering and the continuing tensions between making and thinking.

 In 2006 I spent time with the Forensic Engineering BSc course at  Sheffield Hallam University. In the materials analysis classes students were assigned broken objects and asked to determine the cause of the breakage using microscopic and chemical analysis tools. One object given for analysis was the bottom section of a three part metal mould, used to make bottles for a well known brand of Vodka. The mould was fractured clean in two with an almost cartoonish jagged broken edge. Analysis revealed a manufacturing fault, where air folded into the metal whilst cooling caused a later fracture.

 Following Benjamin’s interest in teleology, the process of tracing the history of the broken mould was interrupted by copying it and returning it to the students, paying them to analyse what in fact would now be an unbroken broken edge.

 The replica was made within the engineering department in Metrology. Mac the metrologist must bring in revenue for the University by undertaking commercial contracts. He measures machine components to see if they are the correct size and is commissioned to produce exact copies using rapid prototyping technology. Mac confessed that the equipment had yet to give him an exact copy. Just as the original broken mould had flaws built into it, by commissioning the University to copy the mould the University’s own economic, operational and to some extent, philosophical flaws was be folded back into the mould.

 Following the transformation of the object and its broken surface into digital references a layered wax copy was made by rapid prototyping. This process adds its own flaws, leaving on the surface of prototypes a kind of diagram of cross hatches and lines. The ‘mould’ was cast in a brass, as close to the original material as possible. The same students were paid to perform another analysis and write a report on the object’s faults. As the mould’s structure is, in reality, unbroken, the students were left to determine what fault they were being asked to diagnose.

 The resulting object is a peculiar thing, neither art object, nor engineered, over-laden with time and value, perhaps what Benjamin describes as a dialectical image, alienated and hollowed out. The work is difficult to resolve in a communicable form, but without which it has the danger of becoming as pointlessly excessive as the copied form itself. Perhaps the ideal outcome for the work is that the copy, once dissected and analysed by the students is recopied and returned to students the following year, mimicking the constant accumulation of value through commodities, the process endlessly forcing distortion into the object, as capitalism distorts social relationships.