When engineering tools meet fine art, the times start to catch up to science fiction.

A professor of sculpture, Dan Collins, is experimenting with rapid protoyping, e-mail, and digital files of artwork to transmit solid objects anywhere on the planet. Engineers in far-flung enterprises have done work like this before, swapping digital files and eventually feeding them to a machine.

But Collins is talking about using similar technology for a broader range of objects, not just parts and systems in the early stages of development. In essence, he's talking about a form of teleportation. Of course, you and I can't go, nor can our luggage, but some things do get through.

Collins calls the program TeleSculpture and invites artists to send digital 3-D files by the Internet to be rendered by a rapid prototyping machine.

Collins is one of the directors of Prism, a lab at Arizona State University in Tempe for interdisciplinary research into modeling and visualization. The lab was founded with money from ASU's vice provost for research and from the schools of architecture and environmental design, fine arts, engineering and applied sciences, business, and liberal arts.

According to Collins, he has conducted TeleSculpture for several years at the lab, but this past October saw the program's first run in a museum.

A 3-D printer at the Exploratorium (center) turns out objects sent over the Internet by sculptors, including Bill Brody in Fairbanks, Alaska (top), and Derrick Woodham in Cincinnati.

The TeleSculpture Web site invites artists from anywhere in the world to submit stereolithography files of their work over the Internet. This past fall, the works were built by a Dimension 3-D Printer during a special exhibit at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. According to a spokesperson, Linda Dackman, the Exploratorium is a hands-on science museum. It was founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, a physicist and the younger brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb.

Collins was in residence at the museum last October during TeleSculpture 2003. Submissions to him came into the lab's server in Tempe, and Collins downloaded them to his laptop at the museum, where he directed them to the printer.

The Exploratorium displayed the sculptures after they were built by the machine, and visitors also got to watch the technology at work—the 3D Printer building the objects in ABS plastic, in layers as thin as a hundredth of an inch, cured by light. The printer was donated by the Dimension unit of Stratasys Inc. in Eden Prairie, Minn.

Unless they've had their teeth bonded, most people aren't aware of plastic resins that cure almost instantly under light. So the Exploratorium may be giving many their first inkling of something that has become increasingly common in engineering circles.

"Since its introduction, we have exposed the Dimension to numerous new markets, including architecture, landscape architecture, animation design, and toy making," said Jon Cobb, vice president and general manager of 3-D printing for Stratasys. "We feel that by having the Dimension at the Exploratorium we have the opportunity to expose 3-D printing and the value it brings to any creative process to a very broad-based audience."

Submissions have come from as far north as Alaska and as far down under as New Zealand. Others come from typical fine arts centers, like Paris and Chicago. One is the figure of an elephant that was modeled in clay and reverse-engineered into a 3-D computer file. Another is an image of a red blood cell, captured by a scanning probe microscope.

According to Collins's Web site for TeleSculpture, he expects several outcomes from the project: for instance, to "enable international collaboration on experimental 3-D design," and to "help bridge the gulf between virtual worlds and the felt-connection of physical works of art." It would also "explore new models for mounting international exhibitions that detour around shipping, logistical, and transportation costs." In other words, something like teleportation.

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