THANKS TO THE LIGHT EXTRUDER EVERYBODY CAN NOW DRAW WITH THE LIGHT
Lightpainting: Gianluca Pugliese uses a Delta WASP TURBO with a special extruder that will be soon shared.
There is a particular territory, where dreams and reality have changing and shifting boundaries. WASP loves swinging in that particular dimension, the art dimension, in its many different forms: One of them is LIGHT PAINTING.
You can describe this particular technique as follows: Taking a picture (usually in a dark environment) with long exposure times in order to capture all light movements with your lens. In a more simple way, we could say that what a light painting photographer actually does is painting with light. The word photography actually comes from the Greek and it means “drawing with light”
Gianluca Pugliese, aka Owen, has been following this pattern for ages.
But apart from being a photographer, he is also a maker and few years ago, following his intuition, he used a 3d printer and experimented “numerical control” light painting.
“Until that moment all 3d printers were Cartesian printers – he says – and the results I got were pretty good but not enough satisfactory. Then, the Delta printers came along and I finally realized they were all I needed to get what I wanted”.
As only a real maker would do, Gianluca got advantage of an open source project found on the web and started to build its own Delta. That was the turning point.
The results he got were so impressive that he took part to the “Biennale” in Venice in 2014 with his project.
“In Venice I met Sebastiano and Marcello, from WASP. I showed my project and they showed me their machines. A great friendship and a useful collaboration were born”.
At FabLab Torino space in Maker Faire Rome 2014, you can see Delta WASP Open upgraded to Light 3d printer version.
After several tests with a Delta WASP Open, WASP gave Gianluca a Turbo. He developed a specific extruder, the LightExtruder, that can replace the original one, just as with the extruder for clay. It does not require any power supplies or specific settings.
The key point is: many other 3D light painting projects already exist but Gianluca, following the “philosophy of sharing”, meant to create something accessible to everyone who wishes to experiment such a brand new material for the 3d printing: the light!
It can be used on every Delta WASP but it performs at its best on a Turbo because it allows a faster light movement thus reducing the exposure time. The Light Extruder has a RGB LED on top and a selector to choose the light color.
Gianluca describes what happens next: “All you have to do is put the camera on a tripod just in front of the printer, turn the light off, and then you run the printer and you take the picture with the BULB mode. The printer starts moving as it was printing something (at a higher speed though) and you can see the LED moving around.
The camera is actually capturing all these movement and once the shooting is done the magic trick appears: the object, created with the light, appears on the screen of the reflex”
The words are just not enough to describe how fascinating his works are.
Of course the experiments keep going.
“I’ve recently took several pictures of the same subject, making it turn of 15 degrees in every file. I assembled the pictures in sequence and what I obtained was a video of this object, made of light that turn on itself”
Genius, intuition, fantasy.
But also commitment, hard study and technique.
New technologies applied to the world of art and sharing.
Gianluca Owen Pugliese is without any doubt a WASPER.
Gianluca Pugliese mail: owenlab@gmail.com
