14 DAY TRIAL // Nestle and the Museum of African Design probably would not have paid much attention to Hans Fouche, despite him owning his own chocolate business, if he didn't do what he just did.
The man and his business, Fouche Chocolates are stationed in Centurion, South Africa. What Fouche did was build his own 3D printer for making chocolate sculptures.
The printer was based on a RepRap model and has eight extruders. It was a good thing that Fouche had a background in engineering, otherwise he wouldn't have managed it.
He did, though, and, through it, got the attention of Nestle and the Museum of African Design.
Both those groups asked him to help produce a line of 3D printed chocolate sculptures for the launch celebration of the newest Google Android operating system (hence the Android logo in the adjoining picture).
The exhibition was called Chocnology and, in addition to Fouche's own works, has submissions by Marchand Le Roux, Arno Kruger, Liron Segev, Mine Jonker of Studio Muti, and Rene Roussouw.
"I couldn't have done this if I wasn't an engineer. It would have all been too expensive […]. A lot of the designs were very ambitious," Fouche said.
"It was only through our experience with 3D printing chocolate that we were able to help the artists to realize what is actually possible. The best are always simple and not over complicated, because chocolate is difficult to work with, it doesn't support itself very well."
The latest Android is Android 4.4 if you were wondering, also known as KitKat. And since KitKat are over half made of chocolate, the homage makes perfect sense.
It also brings more attention to 3D printing, even though the designers couldn't just make the sculptures in one go. They would not have withstood gravity, so they had to print only a few layers at a time and then assemble them.
