Toby Ziegler (b. 1972) lives and works in London, producing sculptures and paintings by combining digital technologies with handcraft. He has had solo exhibitions in venues including The Hepworth Wakefield; New Art Gallery, Walsall; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; and Chisenhale, London. His works are held in many collections including Tate Gallery, London and the Arts Council of England.Gabriel Williams: First let's compare your sculptures with the nineteenth-century mechanical engravings. It seems that both involve a process of abstracting from historic sculptures some notional geometric form, before re-materializing this form, whether on paper or aluminium.Toby Ziegler: In a way my process is the inverse of the anaglyptograph, because usually I'm looking at a two-dimensional image and trying to find the information needed to create a three-dimensional form, which often involves completely reinventing it. With 3D modelling, essentially you are sculpting in virtual space. It's a weird hybrid of sculpting and drawing; you're making form that is three-dimensional form and also very linear. Yet it's not a kind of treatment that's applied evenly, nor is it a case of feeding in photos and outputting a 3D model. I think a lot of people still see computers as a mysterious silver box where you put something in one end and something else comes out the other; I've always felt that it's a tool among other tools. When I started at the very beginning with 3D modelling I was trying to be machine-like in the production of the work, to make things as perfectly and mechanically as possible, with the knowledge that it was impossible. More and more I've embraced that slippage between the two, and realized that it's through embarking on one process that other things happen along the way, as secondary results of your apparent intention. An awful lot of concerns and idiosyncrasies seep into a process. So while it's not inaccurate to say that I look at existing forms and reduce the amount of information to create 'approximations', I suppose I actually end up reinventing the forms and making something completely different.GW: And yet despite developing a quite 'free' or open-ended process of wireframe (re)modelling, you and your assistants are currently re-adopting a much more schematic or 'mechanical' process of remodelling objects. You're building them up using cross-sections, in a way that does echo both mechanical engravings and 3D printing. Why are you doing that?TZ: I'm continuing to embrace this idea of doing something schematic or mechanical but allowing the hand or human error to play its part. We have been looking at various forms and modelling them on the computer, the first form being a hand from the Colossus of Constantine, just this giant dismembered hand that stands about six feet tall. We have modelled and sliced it into 70 sections, so that each one gives you a template, and then printed those out, essentially making a glorified coil-pot. It is something to do with the idea of reducing an object to data. Once you have turned it into a 3D model or a set of templates, it's a thing that doesn't have texture or colour but is just information. It is not tactile, so I suppose the hand is a perverse choice of subject matter in a way, but then when you start to make it by hand it gains this other quality. You might be tempted to think of it as an 'objective' process in the same way that one could see the anaglyptograph, but there are still so many variables and so many choices being made. For instance, there is the choice of whether to make it out of 70 coils or 150 coils, or 2,000 coils. The more I make of them, the more seduced I am by the ones with less information. The first one we made had 70 coils, the next one had 35 and we've just been reducing it, so I'm interested to see what happens when you end up with four, with something that may or may not be recognizable as a hand, depending on the leap of the imagination. …