Chapter 23

Loss Sets

Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung, and Namir Ahmed

Working with Ryerson University’s Digital Media Experience Lab, the Ryerson Geospatial Maps and Data Centre, and the Ryerson Centre for Digital Humanities, the Loss Sets 3-D Poetry Project translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures. The poems are first turned into coordinates along the X, Y, and Z axes, after which (under Tucker, Namir Ahmed, and Tiffany Cheung’s direction) those points are imported into the 3-D modeling software, Rhino, where the models are rendered with the Grasshopper plug-in. The pieces are further manipulated using information such as latitude, longitude, and spot height from the Columbia Icefields. The poems are originally generated under the theme of “loss,” and the icefield data is incorporated with that theme to examine and resist the utopian impulses around 3-D printing “replacing” any object, especially as technologization relates to the natural world. Using these multiple data sets, a sculpture is “carved away” from a six-inch cube, and those results are then printed in 3-D.