Dezeen - October 2, 2013

”Product designer Alan Nguyen has taken a series of extreme close-up photos of 3D-printer filament waste, revealing how the machines can produce detritus of surprising beauty.

"Normally people just throw them away, but I've been collecting these strands of filament for over a year now and they are just so beautiful," said Nguyen.

"It's pure poetry," he explained. "Being produced from a machine that is designed to create exact physical copies of predefined digital code dictating where they should be laid down by Cartesian coordinates, they are free-moving spontaneous bursts of purely saturated awesomeness."

"If you've ever noticed when you use a normal printer, immediately after loading a new cartridge you might get a bit of bleeding of colours because it needs calibration, or some old ink leaked a bit," said Nguyen. "This is exactly the same thing that happens with the Cube 3D Printers while loading a new cartridge."

"A bit of the old filament is left behind when unloading the plastic and mixes with the new filament resulting in these beautifully perfect gradients," he continued. "All of the drama at the top is created purely by chance from external forces either by friction, the ambient climate or somebody simply walking past and altering the flow."