Cones & Pillars series
for Frank Stella

Michael O'Rourke, 1985

 

In 1985, while working at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Laboratory, I did a series of digital sculptures for the artist Frank Stella. These were an extension of his Cones and Pillars series

Stella had previously done a series of relief paintings involving these geometric forms produced as flat cut-outs overlaid on each other. The task here was to create similar compositions, but now using fully three-dimensional forms. Because of the complexity of fabricating these forms and their intersections, Stella sought us out to see if we could do it digitally. With the technical assistance of the computer scientists at NYIT, I digitally modeled these sculptures and produced construction data to allow Stella to fabricate them.

I described a process similar to the one used here for Stella in "A CAD/CAM Approach to Sculpture" published in Sculpture magazine in 1988.

Click the icons below to see samples of the work.