This Artist 3D Printed Chocolate to Protest Machines

We've seen 3D-printed chocolate before, but not like this. Artist Saso Sedlacek, creator of the Jobless Avatars video that debuted at Berlin Art Hack Day, has 3D printed chocolate for a new work called Dolce far niente that skewers technological progress and Europe's economic crisis. Where many see an up-and-coming economic engine in 3D printing, Sedlacek sees just another type of automation that will amplify economic crises.

"The consequences of the economic crisis are shaking up the illusion of the wealthy West and changing the iconography of everyday European life—something which, until recently, we in the Western world have taken for granted," Sedlacek wrote on the Dolce far niente website. "The images of poverty, despair, protests, people under pressure are scenes that are not at all new. What is new is both their frequency and their proximity."

Described as "edible sculptures," these chocolates are, like the finest "craft" products Brooklyn can offer, handmade in small batches. "They are confectionary-sculptural products that are perfect for personal gift giving, events and protocol gifts," wrote Sedlacek.

"I made 3D models using 3DS Max and Mudbox, but the originals were 3D printed in 'gypsum powder' from which silicon casts were made, then chocolate was cast in," Sedlacek told me. "The first idea was to 3D print directly into chocolate, but I couldn’t find the technology here in Slovenia that would print the required level of details."

"The chocolate melts and is therefore only good for rough printing," he added. "The chocolate 3D technology is already out but too expensive at the moment, and then there are logistic problems since I would have to do this abroad and with time deadlines. But, the idea for future upgrade of the project is definitely in direct chocolate 3D printing."

Ironically, Sedlacek used 3D-modeling and 3D-printing technology to create these "handmade" chocolates. Sedlacek sees a new path for mass unemployment in additive manufacturing.

"The manufacturing process… symbolically shows the potential pitfalls of technological development that, while promoting many positive innovations, within the new regime of economic commodity exchange, merely hides the danger of unemployment for an entire class of people," he added.

"Thanks to the affordability of 3D-printing technology, we can now print at home things and objects that, until recently, we had to buy in a physical or online store," said Sedlacek via email. "However, one must ask what will happen to the intermediate line of producers, transporters, storekeepers, salespeople, etc. What does this mean for the future of an entire chain of people who are now active in the exchange of goods?"

Appropriately, the edible sculptures take the form of a beggar, a protester, a prostitute, a suicide (a hanged woman), a busker with an accordion, and a drug addict. What better way for the monied and leisure classes to enjoy chocolates than by figuratively consuming the class of people that so many of them literally exploit anyway? Too Marxist? Well, so be it. It's one way to see the world we live in. Another irony here is that even more people can now join the ownership class with 3D-printing technology.

This isn't the first time Sedlacek has waded into overtly socioeconomic and political waters. In fact, you might describe this as his raison d'etre. Back in 2006, Sedlacek created Beggar Robot, a robot for the "materially deprived." Built from low-tech components, the Beggar Robot is the proxy for "impoverished individuals and families, refugees and asylum seekers, elderly people, disabled people, and those hidden from the public view."

For my money, though, Dolce far niente is far more delicious satire. It's very much a Luddite argument. As Thomas Pynchon put it in his "Is It O.K. To Be a Luddite?" essay published in The New York Times:

The knitting machines which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw this happening - it became part of daily life. They also saw the machines coming more and more to be the property of men who did not work, only owned and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or later, to point out what this did, had been doing, to wages and jobs.

Public feeling about the machines could never have been simple unreasoning horror, but likely something more complex: the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery—especially when it's been around for a while—not to mention serious resentment toward at least two multiplications of effect that were seen as unfair and threatening. One was the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and the other was the ability of each machine to put a certain number of humans out of work—to be ''worth'' that many human souls.

Pynchon continued:

What gave King Ludd [the Luddite god] his special Bad charisma, took him from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was that he went up against these amplified, multiplied, more than human opponents and prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass—the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero—who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?

The same holds true with the 3D printing. For every used car salesman pitch about the liberating qualities of technological progress, there is always a group of individuals on the losing end. Sedlacek knows it, as do we all. So it is, and so shall it ever be.