3D digital modelling in visual arts education – How does technology feed in to new approaches to sculpturing and what are the new aesthetic qualities?

The purpose of the project proposal is to develop a framework for discussing the role of technology in visual arts education from the educational subject’s point of view. The aim of this project is to identify new image-making processes in one of the key areas of art production: sculpturing. The project will focus on 3D modelling and explore how the use of digital technology may contribute to form new perspectives on the classical sculpture techniques of adding, carving or modelling analogue materials. How does the linear creation process governed by material qualities take new directions both by stating from the point where the creation of the sculpture takes place ahead of its materialisation via programming and 2D testing and by starting with creation of a sculpture by a manual mastery of a material and transforming it into a digital format? From this perspective, the process of sculpturing can be seen as a transformation of subject-related competences, since manual aesthetic modelling skills are replaced with aesthetic coding skills, and there is no bodily contact with material (Sack, 2019). The sculpture produced by digital intervention is not a replacement of a known sculptural process, but a new image-making process. Technology creates a division between the hand, tool and material and introduces distance between bodily perceptions and the object, but it also involves a pattern of thought connected to programming skills. From a visual arts perspective, this may reinforce students’ programming skills or it allows students who are more skilled in programming than art to express themselves visually. From the perspective of technology comprehension this may meet the overall learning objectives of technological capacity building and the subject specific learning objective of programming and construction (Buhl & Skov 2020). The outcome of the development project will feed in to all EDDA partners’ discussion about how digital technology not only adds new tools for visual arts production, but may transform existing modes of visual expression and sensitive cognition.