Two of the artists in the Met MakerBot Hackathon, Colette Robbins and Micah Ganske, sat down with us to share their perspectives on their #Met3D collaboration. Bios on these two artists below the video.

Colette Robbins was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from Parsons, the New School for Design. Colette shows her work both nationally and internationally. Recently her work has been featured in shows at Deitch Projects, NY, Workshop Gallery, Venice, Italy, Lesley Heller Work Space, NY, RH Gallery, NY, Art Star, NY, Yautepec, Mexico City, Mexico, Field Projects, NY, Sloan Fine Art, NY, and 92 Y Tribeca, NY. She is an affiliate of Parlour, a nomadic exhibitions project that holds one-night art salons in living rooms throughout the five boroughs of NYC and abroad. colette has been awarded grants for residencies such as The Cill Rialaig Project in Ireland, and the Vermond Studio Center. She now lives and works in Queens, New York.

Micah Ganske was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1980. In 2002 he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Post-Baccalaureate certificate from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2003. In 2005 he received his MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art. In 2005 he was the recipient of the Adobe Design Achievement Award in Digital Photography at a reception held at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where his work was also displayed. In October, 2007, Deitch Projects exhibited Ganske’s first solo exhibition. In 2011 he launched his second solo exhibition with RH Gallery in Tribeca, where he is now represented.

This is the first collaboration of these two artists, which is remarkable since they share a studio. And they are married.

Here’s what we’ve learned from a marathon day at the Met with a full team of artists and museum staff. We want to share as much wisdom with readers as possible, and ask you to please chime in in the comments. Remember, this is a community! If you have experience with any of these technologies, we need to know!

The surest steps to success using 123D Catch to capture and remake art:

– Provide enough information with your pictures. Basically, make sure each point in your object is appearing in at least three shots, and make sure there is uniform light around the thing you’re trying to Catch. When you don’t have enough info, you’re likely to get a solid block of mass in your model or a total lack of mass where there should be some stuff. Check out the big hole underneath this ritual seat from the Oceanic Art collection.

– If possible, use objects in the background of what you are trying to capture to help the software parse depth. 123D Catch does not like a blank wall with flat paint.

– There is no right way to do this stuff. This is the frontier and we’re figuring this out together. Everyone in this group today was tossing out different ideas and each artist or team of artists was taking a different path toward the goal.

Overheard

“This is all experimental. There is no ‘way.’” — Bre Pettis (@bre)

“By taking a whole series of close up pictures just at one level, I got really good 3D detail. Really good reproduction of very, very small depth.” — Michael Curry (skimbal)

“I’m using an iPhone to do this.” — Adam (@adamfont)

One of the things that we’re doing with all the digitized things from the Met that are being uploaded to Thingiverse is including the accession number. What is this numbering system?

Don Undeen explained to me that the two digit numbers are how they started the documentation of things in the 1800′s and they had a Y2K problem after a hundred years. He also told me that there are a few duplicate accession numbers because the authority for doling them out wasn’t centralized back in the day. Bonus points for finding them in the museum! I’m guessing that every library scientist has a foible about their numbering system. I should also mention that they are called accession numbers because they document the time that they are accessible!

The Met’s site explains.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art assigns a unique accession number to each object it acquires. The first two or four digits of an accession number refer to the year that the object became part of the Metropolitan’s collection. The Museum was founded in 1870 and for the first 100 years of its existence two digits were used. Thus, the first item accessioned into the Museum has the number 70.1 because it was accessioned in 1870.

The accession number for Edgar Degas’s A Woman Seated Beside a Vase of Flowers (Madame Paul Valpinçon?) is 29.100.128. The number 29 refers to the year 1929. The number 100 refers to the collection within which the painting entered the Museum. In this case, it is the Havemeyer Collection, comprised of almost 2,000 items, which came to the Museum in 1929. This particular object is number 128 in that collection.

The accession number for the Roman statue Old Market Woman is 09.39. The 09 refers to 1909, the year in which the statue entered the Museum’s collection. Because it does not have a collection number, we know that this item came to the Museum as an individual object.

In 1970, a century after the Museum’s founding, the style of accession numbers changed. It became necessary to differentiate the accessions of the Museum’s second century from those of the first. For example, the accession number for Vincent van Gogh’s Shoes is 1992.374. This painting was acquired by the Museum in 1992.

So basically they came up with their own version of the Dewey decimal system that worked for the museum. Very cool. I love hearing about the different ways that things are organized.

The transfer of physical objects into the Thingiverse has begun. You know when Flynn gets digitized into the game grid. Yeah, like that, but in the Met! Get ready to start DERIVING/HACKING/MAKING!

The works of art that the team of artists from the Met MakerBot Hackathon are starting to be processed in 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. The first one is right here! A whole new chapter of universal access to art!

This means that the design files for the 3D models of these pieces, as well as the pieces that this team of artists are creating, will be available to everyone around the world to download for free. Whether or not you have a MakerBot (we hope you do), you can get up close and personal with this art in a whole new way.

Here’s what you need to know:

Thingiverse is designed so that one person can upload a design file and another person can download it. If you make a version of someone else’s Thing, here’s the one thing you should do.

PRESS THIS BUTTON.

That’s it! That’s the only step. Pressing that button shows the world that you are contributing by testing other people’s designs, and giving your thumbs up to the quality.

If you forget to do this and you upload your Thing on its own, don’t worry. You can actually go back through and name a “parent” for your Thing. Simply click “Edit” at the top of your Thing page, scroll to the bottom, and enter the Thingiverse ID number of the parent Thing.

This is important stuff on Thingiverse. Since everyone in the world is putting in the work to make new Things for everyone else to enjoy, it’s important to attribute stuff to its origins. This is how we build off each other’s work and ensure that everyone is a rock star.

Why are you still reading this?! There’s art from the Met on Thingiverse. Go!

We’ll keep adding pictures to this Flickr set throughout the day.

This is how insanely cool the Met is: several of the curators for the different departments we are 123D-Catching things in today are taking time to show us around and answer questions about the art and the entire concept of the Hackathon.

I thought one comment in particular from Associate Curator for Oceanic Art Eric Kjellgren was worth throwing up here on the blog for people to consider.

After several questions about the art, patiently answered by Mr. Kjellgren, the creative mind behind Project Shellter Miles Lightwood (aka TeamTeamUSA) asked how this expert felt about the Met MakerBot Hackathon. He said he was very interested to see what would come out of it, and said his only caution would be this: most of the pieces in the Oceanic Arts collection were religious in nature, and that the art we make from them should keep that in mind.

That’s definitely something to remember when using technologies like 123D Catch and MakerBot to make art based on art. For example, when you start capturing things in your town for the Capture Your Town challenge, keep it real.

Here’s Mr. Kjellgren’s bio:

Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art, Department of Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  His specialized research interests include the art, culture, religion, and oral traditions of Oceania. Prior to joining the Metropolitan Museum, he was Assistant to the Associate Curator of North American Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (1985-86), and Research Assistant at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu (1990-93).

Today a group of artists with a knack for taking things from the digital world into the physical world will spend some time first doing the opposite: looking at real physical objects and capturing them with cameras and software and making them become digital. It’s that digital space where the new shaping and changing may take place.

Last month, I had a chance to ask some questions of another great artist, who is not part of today’s event but who has certainly thought a lot about this type of art.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez likes to think in terms of “sampling”. This concept is familiar to us in music, where one bit of a song might be pulled out and repeated with a new beat underneath. This is a mixing of familiar stuff and new stuff, which is what Matthew sees in some of his work, like this tea set.

It’s based off a blue vase he found in a flea market once, seen below. I just grabbed a still image off my screen, but you can see the actual model on hypr3D.com. That site provides a free scanning service that allows someone to upload some digital photos of an object and convert them into a 3D mesh with a texture file. Matthew says the process is done within minutes, and he’s had good success with it. Hypr3D was a handy preservation tool in this case: he had dropped the vase and broken it, so creating this mesh was a way of keeping it around.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today a dream is coming true for me. I’m in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a crew of artists and we’re scanning the artwork here, we’re sharing them, and we’re hacking on them.

You can follow along here on the MakerBot blog, the MakerBot Twitter, follow the #MET3D hashtag and the newest things on Thingiverse.

I was an art teacher in Seattle Public Schools and with my students I could only get them to a museum once a year. Together we would get on a bus, go get a tour of a museum and go back to school.

It was great to go to a museum, but it was limited. I had a wish then that I could bring the museum into the classroom. Little did I know that 6 years later, I would be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with some of the best artists and designers in the world scanning art and sharing it on Thingiverse for the world to download and make. We’re taking it even farther than that though. I don’t think I imagined that the work could be changed, mashed-up, hacked, and remade. It is truly a brilliant and wonderful future we live in where you can go into a museum that allows photography, take lots of pictures and then use 123D Catch to turn it into a model and share it on Thingiverse.

I’m so proud of the Met. It’s my town’s museum and it’s a brave and bold institution and it is so forward thinking that they’ve invited us in to scan, hack, and make things. When I started Thingiverse, I knew that I wanted the classic sculptures of the world to be in the universal library of things, but I imagined that someone would have to pull off the ultimate heist to make that happen. Instead of having to steal the art, the Met shares the future vision of MakerBot where the greatest artworks of the world are accessible to everyone and they’ve invited us in to make history and share the art with the world.

I’m thrilled about this, but it’s just the beginning. I hope that you will explore and capture and share the great artworks of your town. Together, we can create a great database that will inspire the next generation of artists.

People who subscribe to our newsletter (check the top right corner of this blog to sign up!), already know that what we’re doing at the Met today is the start of something huge. Like, super huge. The size of the Earth, and we’re putting all of it on Thingiverse.

Or rather, you’re putting it on Thingiverse!

Today is the beginning of the MakerBot Capture Your Town initiative. Just like the artists at the Met this weekend are using their cameras to pick out amazing pieces of art to photograph and process with 123D Catch, you can find the things where you live that make it your home. Maybe it’s an old water fountain in the park, or the office building you drive to every day, or your City Hall, or a statue, or your cat. Maybe it’s a model of the Waldo Emerson Inn in Kennebunk, Maine, that I noticed on Tinkercad yesterday.¹

Or this awesome Arch, already on Thingiverse.

This is everyone’s chance – my chance, your chance, your grandma’s chance – to realize that we are living in a time where the limits on what we can do with the things around us are dropping like flies. Even if you don’t own a MakerBot, you can contribute to the museum of the future, or #futuremuseum on twitter, that Thingiverse is becoming.

All you need is your camera, a steady hand, and the free software 123D Catch from Autodesk.

Let’s build a map of the world that the MakerBot Community lives in, starting with your town. Watch this blog and our twitter for updates and guidance. Once you are ready to share your models, be sure to tag it on twitter (#futuremuseum) and on Thingiverse (futuremuseum). Get your gears turning and go!

1. Hey, did anyone notice you can now embed things from Tinkercad?! [↩]

Where John MakerBots (and EggBots and solders, etc.)

John writes that he and his wife share this space in their home, where MakerBot Cupcake CNC #1136 lives, along with some musical stuff, some drawing bots (EggBot and Polargraph with a MakerBotted Gondola), and a sewing/knitting station. I hope the tunes of that Cupcake are part of the music setup.

Thanks for sharing, John. If you think you have a nice picture of Where You MakerBot, we’d love to see it. Send it here.