Joseph Zhang – Looking Outwards – 03

Rottlace is a 3D fabrication project built in MIT’s Media Lab by The Mediated Matter. Rottlace is a family of masks designed for Icelandic musician called Björk. The project’s form and texture pulls much of its inspiration from the human body’s various muscle-to-muscle and muscle-to-bone relationships, and in many ways, attempts to merge them together. The masks were printed by Stratasys using multi-material 3D printing, which allows complex combinations of various properties to be implemented in the construction of a single object.

I chose this piece because of its mesmerizing flowing nature, and ultimately began reading more on it after realizing how complex the architectural forms of the mask truely were. To be able to design and build something so intricate yet natural is amazing. Coming from a sector of the MIT that focuses on using nature as design inspiration, I’d assume that Rottlace was built on algorithms representative of biological muscle tissue. The visionaries who built this mask have fabricated it in a way that has extracted the beautiful curves and lines found in the internal workings of nature, and replicated them through 3D form-building.

www.media.mit.edu/projects/rottlace/overview/