The capacity to explore physical artistic work in abstraction through digital transformation and fabrication is conceptually simple, but technically challenging. Our “machine-in-the-loop” workflow is comprised of a laser scanner to generate a point cloud of the artist’s sculpture, software to create a watertight mesh of that point cloud, parametric design software to procedurally transform the mesh, a slicing tool for generating toolpaths for severely damaged 3D models, a 3D printer capable of working through tooling errors, and a vacuum form table to prepare the final model. The tool of intervention for our artist was air drying clay and Super Sculpey in addition to some basic sculpting tools. An oven was also involved. We used this workflow to generate a series of machine “responses” to the artist’s sculpture. The artist then created a response this response. And so on. Our goal was to enable to “dialog” between the artist and machine that helped the artist explore unexpected shapes and gestures. Our technical exploration was successful and, based on this functional experimental workflow and a conversation with our artist, our artistic exploration was also successful.