In the summer of 2017, artist and architect Tobias Klein spent time as an Artist in Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School of Stanwood, Washington. There, he created two works of art that he states explore the relationship between glassblowing, glass casting and 3D printing.

His work “Augmented Fauna” started with a traditional method of glass casting to create a glass cast of the pelvic bone of a deer, doing a three-dimensional scan of the cast to create a 3D model that was digitally augmented to create a “digital prosthesis.” Second, he made a 3D printed version of the prosthesis to graft onto the glass cast. Third, He used another 3D printed version of the prosthesis to create a cast using the 3D printed substrate. Finally, he grafted the new glass cast onto the original deer bone, resulting in two geometrically identical sculptures that had been created via different means.

The other work, “Glass Mutations”, formed using glassblowing and 3D printing, takes inspiration from the concept of biological cell division. Klein used two glassblowers to help him create like objects that resemble biological cells, which were incorporated into larger art installations using 3D printing.

While ways of 3D printing with glass trace back as far as September 2009, Klein avoids directly 3D printing with glass, instead “exploring” the “interaction” between 3D printing and more traditional means of glass crafting. The masses are invited to draw their own conclusions from Tobias Klein’s work “Augmented Fauna and Glass Mutations: A Dialogue Between Material and Technique in Glassblowing and 3D Printing.”