Contemporary art is currently challenging all categories and ways of understanding it, opening the door to new creative possibilities. Its intersection with other fields is one of its fundamental features, with technology being one of the favorites on the agenda. In fact, the new digital revolution is changing the way we understand and make art. Just a few decades ago, no one could have imagined the impact these changes would have on our daily lives.
We are experiencing an invasion of household appliances that make our day-to-day easier and faster by performing all kinds of tasks: they cook, clean, wash, dry, cut, process, heat and cool, regulate the temperature of our environment, and stimulate all our senses with images and sounds… Our exposure to them is constant—now more than ever, as we spend much of our time at home, working and studying remotely.
Perhaps it was this—and especially the COVID-19 pandemic—that motivated many creative and curious individuals to experiment with alternative uses for these devices, giving them new poetic and artistic meaning. Today, more and more artists are interested in exploring new practices and materials, merging processes and agents that challenge certain characteristics of traditional art. For example: How should authorship be understood if the artist’s hand participates in only a portion of the object’s production process? Or, if the procedure is mediated by machinic action, should the result be categorized as art or as craft? With questions like these, art opens up new ways of defining itself, adapting to rapidly and constantly changing circumstances.
In this context of technological effervescence, household printers began acquiring new functions within a single device, such as scanning or copying photographs and other two-dimensional documents onto paper. These changes have made work in studios or offices more efficient and space-saving at a time when we ceaselessly move between the analog and digital worlds. But the true revolution lies in the printing of depth and volume. Through this discovery, art history confronts itself again. The pursuit of mimesis—meaning the exact imitation of nature—has long been one of art’s driving forces, a pillar that has pushed artistic thinking and the execution of creative solutions. If painting was the first discipline to conquer the third dimension through perceptual techniques such as Alberti’s perspective, photography later achieved an even closer approximation of reality. The advent of modernity and mass industrialization gave rise to the historical avant-gardes and mixed practices such as collage, as well as the use of the body and space as tools for artistic creation. Visual arts began incorporating new materials and technical processes, and emerging disciplines like photography and film integrated machines directly into their methods of production, circulation, and consumption. Within this framework, the Bauhaus became a pioneer in uniting art, craft, and design, fueling the development of the creative industries. From this perspective, it is clear that artistic practices have always been tied to technique—albeit in different ways. Today, electronic poetics function as attempts to bring art closer to daily life, using technology as an essential artifact for that integration.
3D printers can transform abstract ideas into tangible realities, offering the possibility of choosing the finish, texture, colors, and materials of an object based on a digital model. The process is as follows: once the prototype is designed, specialized software analyzes it and slices it into multiple thin layers. This results in a set of instructions in a programming language known as G-code, which is then sent to the machine. Several parameters are selected—such as material, temperature, and execution speed. The printing process is sequential: layers are deposited according to the encoded instructions. In this way, the materialization of the object takes place through the adhesion of layers from the bottom up. It is a work of extreme precision; even the finest details and filigree structures can be reproduced with maximum accuracy. Depending on the design, once printing is complete, the user may need to remove some supports generated by the machine to stabilize the object. Additional finishes—such as sanding, painting, or assembling pieces—may also be applied.
This way of producing objects is increasingly permeating different areas of our lives, transforming how we relate to the digital world. For example, it can be used to create household items—such as hanging systems, organizers for small objects, coasters, or lampshades—as well as toys or medical components. 3D printing can produce virtually anything that is constructively conceivable, so the possibilities are infinite. The rapid democratization of the method has led to the personalization of products, turning it into a household craft suitable for large-scale sales or personal use. Variations exist not only in materials and printing settings but also in scale. Pieces can achieve almost any size and be combined with other conventional manufacturing systems.
But not everything depends on settings. Behind every activation of the machine lies the most important part of the process: the human mind. Beyond being a technical procedure, 3D printing is, above all, a creative challenge. The goal is to test the system’s capabilities against one’s creative skills to develop new digital designs. Searching for reference models, analyzing and shaping forms and textures, choosing color, scale, materials, temperatures, and intervention techniques—this all allows us to think of 3D printing as an art form. In fact, the technique of adding material layer by layer can be associated with sculpture, where materials are gradually accumulated to construct the final work.
For this reason, rather than a rupture with artistic tradition, these practices can be understood as a continuity—a new stage in the history of the relationship between art and technique. Just as the chisel or the mold once were, the 3D printer now expands the possibilities for creation and expression, opening new questions about what constitutes a work of art, how it is produced, circulated, and consumed, and what role the artist plays. Clearly, the printer—like the camera or any other electronic device used to make art—does not replace artists; it redefines their position in the process. Their role is reinvented through code, but not eliminated. For example, manual manipulation of matter is no longer always necessary. Ideas, aesthetic judgment, design skills, technical resolution, and oversight all matter. The traditional hand-drawn sketch may now exist as a digital .STL file. After printing, the artist may sand, assemble, paint, or intervene using other manual techniques that reintroduce direct contact with the work.
Likewise, the machine is not simply an instrument; it is an active agent that acts according to the instructions it receives. For this reason, one might even consider a collaboration between both parties. As the production process evolves, the concept of authorship must also shift—now shared between human and machine. The human creates, designs, and programs the execution, while the machine translates this into code and then into matter. Thus, the final result preserves a human imprint, although mediated by the machine. Each piece can also be reproduced, although the automatic process always leaves room for unpredictability. This introduces a new form of co-authorship, allowing us to conceive the final product as digital craftsmanship and to imagine the possibility of mass-produced artisanal goods.
In Buenos Aires, 3D printing studios are multiplying rapidly. Some produce utilitarian objects, while others explore the creative and poetic potential of the technique. At Neue Casa Taller, Pablo Levy and Gonzalo Szechter combine their expertise in industrial design to experiment with digital morphologies that they transform into contemporary sculptures. Inspired by the Bauhaus and modern architecture, they seek to integrate art and design through emerging technologies. One of their main goals is to demystify the artwork as a unique and inaccessible object, committing to democratization across all stages of the process: production, circulation, and consumption. They choose easily adaptable materials and procedures, suitable even for domestic environments. Their technical mastery allows them to become prosumers: producers capable of personalizing their manufacturing methods according to their interests and preferences. They also pay close attention to enhancing the aesthetic experience they promote. For three years, they have participated in art fairs such as Buenos Aires Directo de Artistas (BADA), where creators can sell their works without intermediaries and establish direct contact with their clients, sharing values, ideas, and processes firsthand.
Ultimately, 3D printing—more than a technique—seems to be a new language. A new way of thinking about art, from conception to circulation. Its true potential lies in transforming the relationships between art and technology, idea and matter, craft and automation, digital and analog, production and consumption, the local and the global. Through this shift, we understand that art draws from its history and tradition but thrives on its capacity to reinvent itself. 3D printing blurs old modernist categories and opens multiple, rhizomatic, constantly evolving paths. The proliferation of 3D-printing production nodes around the world dedicated to creating design crafts and sculptures reflects a new way of understanding artistic goods as consumable products. All of this represents both a challenge and an opportunity: to learn, in real time, the rules of contemporary art and design, and in doing so, to rethink ourselves, developing new creative capacities and adaptive skills.