November 17, 2016 – January 14, 2017

Opening reception: Thursday, November 17, 6 – 8pm

Pari Nadimi Gallery is pleased to present Marching Cubes, a solo exhibition by California-based Canadian artist Jesse Colin Jackson. Marching Cubes leverages 3D printing to make the virtual world physical.

Drawing inspiration from an eponymous computer algorithm, Marching Cubes is part sculpture, part playground. In the 1980s, researchers devised a method of generating mesh graphics from medical scan data that featured an underlying grammar of faceted cubes. Jackson has taken this digital syntax and refined it into a language for assembly, produced as a family of 3D printed components with interlocking geometries and magnetic connections—and invited people to help build with them. The participants enact the algorithm in the real world, becoming a collective computer in service of sculptural form-making.

Marching Cubes at Pari Nadimi Gallery depicts the results of these interactive experiments, as the conclusion of a two-part series of events that began at the Experimental Media Performance Lab (xMPL) in Irvine, California. The two-channel video on view portrays the collaborative construction performances that took place at the xMPL. The accompanying sculpture is a refinement of the most successful assembly participants helped to create there, presented alongside an inventory of the components from which it was created. Marching Cubes generates dialogue about the ways in which information technologies create the building blocks of contemporary culture.