On the Visual Agency of Manufacturing Models

Abstract

Assuming that rapidly altering agencies and media of digital fabrication are only beginning to resonate in transdiscplinary research, innovation may emerge outside perspectives of efficiency and optimization. With a background of cultural technique research on the construction of drawing and distributed authorship, this paper proposes to read manufacturing models through the art historical notion of the ‘image act.’ Approaching the visual agency and suggestive power of this rather disparate topic, it suggests that authors pay renewed attention to the underlying conditions of their practices, corrective relations between the physical and digital and notions of brilliance and uncertainty. This is conceived as a tentative inquiry into the ontological foundation of digital workflows – eventually attempting to shift the discourse on CAD/CAM from ‘possibility’ to ‘constraint’ space.