Patrick Parrish Gallery, in collaboration with MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab and Christophe Guberan, presents an immersive, futuristic manufacturing facility using a cutting-edge new printing method for this year’s Design Curio at the Design Miami/ fair. Rapid liquid printing is a breakthrough 3-D printing technology, developed in collaboration with Steelcase, which can quickly produce objects of almost any size or shape using a robot and a tank of gel.

Visitors to the fair can watch as a robotic arm creates fully-formed art, design or furniture objects in seconds to minutes inside a gel suspension. Each object is printed inside the tank, removed and cleaned by a technician, and immediately displayed for sale. Curio objects include a bag designed by Swiss designer Christophe Guberan, which is made completely of seamless rubber, an object virtually impossible to create by any other method.

Rapid liquid printing can produce large-scale objects out of high-grade materials like rubber, foam, or plastic in a fraction of the time it takes traditional printing methods by “drawing” them in a gel suspension. Traditional 3-D printing is restricted by slow speeds, scale constraints, and poor material quality, which makes it unreliable as a mainstream manufacturing process. With rapid liquid printing, manufacturing can be reimagined as an artistic experience unlimited by scale or gravity, asking us to rethink design, production, uniformity, and product life cycles. This Design Curio Installation is the first public demonstration of MIT’s rapid liquid printing technology. Made possible by swissnex Boston and Presence Switzerland.