3D printer enables painting with light

"Almost all 3D printers were Cartesian printers and the results I got were pretty good but not enough satisfactory. Then, the Delta printers came along and I finally realised they were all I needed to get what I wanted," said Pugliese.

Taking advantage of of an open source project found online, he started to build his own Delta 3D printer. That was the turning point. The results he got were so impressive that he took part in the Venice Biennale. “In Venice I met Sebatiano and Marcello, from WASP. I showed them my project and they showed me their machines. A great friendship and a useful collaboration was born."

After testing with a Delta Open, WASP gave him a Turbo. He developed a specific extruder, the LightExtruder, that can replace the original one without requiring any power supplies or specific settings. The LightExtruder has an RGB LED and a selector to choose the light colour. It can be used on every Delta WASP but it performs at its best on a Turbo because it allows for faster light movement, thus reducing the exposure time.

Pugliese explains: “All you have to do is put the camera on a tripod just in front of the printer, turn the light off, then you run the printer and you take the picture with the BULB mode. The printer starts moving as if it was printing something (at a higher speed though) and you can see the LED moving around. The camera is actually capturing all these movement and once the shooting is done the magic trick appears: the object, created with the light, appears on the screen of the camera.”

The artist is also experimenting further: “I’ve recently taken several pictures of the same subject, making it turn 15° in each shot. I assembled the pictures in sequence and what I obtained was a video of this object, made of light, that turns on itself.”