Reverse engineering Jackson Pollock
Can a machine be trained to paint like Jackson Pollock? More specifically, can 3D-printing harness the Pollock’s distinctive techniques to quickly and accurately print complex shapes?
“I wanted to know, can one replicate Jackson Pollock, and reverse engineer what he did,” said L. Mahadevan, the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and of Physics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).
Mahadevan and his team combined physics and machine learning to develop a new 3D-printing technique that can quickly create complex physical patterns — including replicating a segment of a Pollock painting — by leveraging the same natural fluid instability that Pollock used in his work.
The research is published in Soft Matter.
3D and 4D printing has revolutionized manufacturing but the process is still painstakingly slow.
The issue, as it usually is, is physics. Liquid inks are bound by the rules of fluid dynamics, which means when they fall from a height, they become unstable, folding and coiling in on themselves. You can observe this at home by drizzling honey on a piece of toast.
More than two decades ago, Mahadevan provided a simple physical explanation of this process, and later suggested how Pollock could have intuitively used these ideas to paint from a distance. More