2026–27 MIT CAST Visiting Artist Chris Bathgate's work treats precision machining as an art form, each piece emerging from a cycle of design, fabrication, and revision that mirrors systems engineering. Image: Courtesy of the artist.
Chris Bathgate
2026–27 CAST Visiting Artist
Machined sculpture meets advanced manufacturing research
About the Residency
Self-taught machinist and sculptor Chris Bathgate creates intricately engineered metal sculptures using handmade tools and CNC milling machines he has spent twenty-five years building and adapting. His work treats precision machining as an art form, each piece emerging from a cycle of design, fabrication, and revision that mirrors systems engineering. He is the author of The Machinist Sculptor: Industry Meets Craft and has coined the term “studio machining” to describe the field his practice has defined.
Over six visits to MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), Bathgate collaborates with CBA director Neil Gershenfeld and students in the lab to push the capabilities of multi-axis machining centers in directions their conventional users don’t attempt. Bathgate’s sculptures demand unconventional workflows across CAD, CAM, tooling, and fixturing, and the troubleshooting required to produce them is already improving research processes in the lab. Not a trained engineer, the documentation Bathgate develops as he works serves as accessible training material for the hundreds of CBA shop users from diverse backgrounds, including students in Gershenfeld’s popular fabrication course MAS.863 How to Make (Almost) Anything.
The residency connects to CBA’s research in design morphogenesis, where Bathgate’s investigations into how sculptural forms evolve through making offer a physical counterpart to the lab’s computational work. His sculptures will be featured at FAB26, the conference bringing the global network of fab labs in over 150 countries back to MIT’s campus.
Chris Bathgate’s work at MIT is supported with a Visiting Artist Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and presented with the MIT Media Lab.
Schedule
Upcoming
FAB26 Conference
July 27–31, 2026
Cambridge, MA
FAB26 is the 22nd edition of the annual Fab Lab Conference & Symposium, an immersive technosocial conference. Spanning six days, the program thoughtfully balances practical and theoretical content for a diverse group of individuals united by a passion for digital fabrication, technology, and innovation.
Collaborators at MIT
Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory breaks down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things.
Gershenfeld is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society. Scientific American named him one of its fifty leaders in science and technology; the Museum of Science and Industry recognized him as one of forty Modern-Day Leonardos; and he has been selected as one of Popular Mechanics‘ twenty-five Makers, a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and one of Prospect and Foreign Policy‘s top one hundred public intellectuals. He is the founder of a global network of more than three thousand Fab Labs in one hundred sixty countries, chairs the Fab Foundation, and leads the Fab Academy.
Biography: MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
As Laboratory Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, Dan Gilbert oversees the center’s shops and labs, managing training, safety protocols, and tool operations. With academic training in biology and chemistry and extensive hands-on experience in prototyping from Clarkson University and five years as shop coordinator for MIT’s Laser Manufacturing and Processing Laboratory, Gilbert brings both technical expertise and operational leadership to CBA.
Biography: MIT Center for Bits and Atoms
Biography
Baltimore-based artist Chris Bathgate is a self-trained machinist. He utilizes handmade tools and automated CNC (computer numerical control) milling and drilling machines to create precisely-crafted elements that assemble into complex sculptures. Machining is his method of artistic expression. He has spent more than fifteen years adapting metalworking machinery from salvaged and repurposed equipment. Bathgate’s aesthetic considerations stem from the very machines that he uses to create his sculptures. Each piece that he makes is informed by its predecessor, and he modifies his machinery accordingly—not for improved practical function but for the aesthetic developments it can produce.
Bathgate is unique in his formalist approach to precision machining as an art form. His entire body of work is an ongoing investigation into this concept. Process lies at the heart of his practice and it serves as the primary catalyst for his ideas. He evaluates his sculptures for form and visual composition in a continuous cycle of ideation, problem solving, fabrication, analysis, and revision, similar to systems engineering. Bathgate’s carefully composed technical diagrams are evidence of his gestaltist outlook, in which the whole may be deconstructed into its elements.
Bathgates’ interdisciplinary work plays with the tension between aesthetic and utility, form and function, and industrial and handmade. It lies at the intersection of art, craft, and design, serving as an example of how computer-mediated fabrication may bridge the divide between art, craft, and industrial production in the Digital Age.
Website: chrisbathgate.com
Social: Instagram