Melt | Remelt

Domestic fabrication during COVID; at MIT, 2021

This project is an attempt for creating new imaginaries of everyday material and everyday domestic space, through small-scale fabrication. In response to the denied access to campus, studio, and shop facilities during the peak of COVID, a desktop CNC machine, “Tiny Z”, was assembled from scratch at home. I chose to experiment with wax as it is easily accessible and almost infinitely reusable. It is light, soft, amorphous, and easily transformable by heat, which is the inspiration for hacking the CNC machine - with an off-the-shelf pyrography pen, customized 3D printed hardwares, and G-code programming - into a wax sculptor. The petite size of this machine makes it impossible to conduct large scale milling like a normal CNC, however, it enables accurate and delicate 3D carving and surface patterning that others cannot achieve. A workflow of “melt-remelt” is developed to fabricate tiny doubly-curved wax bricks with unique texture, which eventually form a home intervention that transforms the experience of passing by a spatial threshold in domestic space.

Special thanks to instructor Zain Karsan