Erica Seccombe

Collective Unconscious

Exhibited in: 

• 2013, Think it, make it share it,  RiAus, The Science Exhange. Adelaide, SALA Festival
• 2013, Freemantle Print Prize, Finalist, Fremantle Art Centre, WA 

Collective unconscious features four objects that replicate the very tip of a garden slater’s leg printed in various sizes. Slaters are a terrestrial crustacean or Isopoda and only grow up to 17mm in length so their legs are tiny. Imagine how big the creature would become if the whole body was printed to the scale of each tip.

Created using a ZPrinter 650, Erica has made these3D objects from virtual volumetric data of a real life garden slater so that the inside and outside of the physical body is replicated in detail. They are not mesh framed objects but derive from volumetric data acquired with 3D Micro-CT X-ray. Erica has visualised the data in Drishti, a custom designed scientific volumetric visualisation program. This work is part of an ongoing practice led research Erica is  undertaking in the ANU Department of Applied Mathematics and  VizLab.

The 3D printing technology allows Erica to replicate this object as many times and in as many sizes and colours as she like. However, the organic form becomes increasingly voxelated (3D pixels) as it increases in scale and pushes beyond the capacity of the data and the technology. Collective unconscious pays homage to both the possibilities and the limits of technology in Western culture, but it is also a play on the human drive to visualize and imitate nature in the pursuit to better understand life and, ultimately the meaning of existence.