Liquid Printed Products

Patrick Parrish Gallery, in collaboration with MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab and Christophe Guberan, and made possible by swissnex Boston and Presence Switzerland presents a futuristic manufacturing facility based on rapid liquid printing, a breakthrough 3-D printing technology developed in collaboration with Steelcase, which can rapidly produce objects of almost any size or shape using a robot and a tank of gel. The space serves as a manufacturing facility in which a robot instantly prints tote bags and art objects inside a glass tank of translucent gel. After printing, each product is removed, cleaned, and put on display. Visitors are able to move around the tank to observe the robot at work, and the produced items are for sale inside the booth. This exhibit is the first public demonstration of MIT’s rapid liquid printing technology. Rapid liquid printing can produce large-scale objects out of high-grade materials like rubber, foam, or plastic in a matter of seconds or minutes by “drawing” them in a gel suspension. Traditional 3-D printing is restricted by slow speeds, scale constraints, and poor material quality, which makes it unreliable as a mainstream manufacturing process. With rapid liquid printing, manufacturing can be reimagined as an artistic experience unlimited by scale or gravity, asking us to rethink design, production, uniformity, and product life-cycles.