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

Picture courtesy of Simon Fieldhouse

Tomorrow, the MakerBot Community and the Metropolitan Museum of Art join forces to realize a common dream, one likely to revolutionize how we all think about art and museums.

For the team from the Met Museum — America’s most iconic museum, a world-beloved, forward-thinking art institution — the dream is to collaborate with cutting-edge artists and DIY-makers, to discover how one might bring the relevant, emerging art practice of 3D capture and 3D printing to bear on the task of enlarging the public conversation about works in their permanent collection. For the MakerBot Community — many of us devoted lovers of the Met, brimming with stories for how the institution and its collection have impacted our lives — this is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clip on our Met Museum entry pins, roll up our sleeves, and do what we do best for the betterment of lovers of the Met world-over.

June 1-2, for the first time in history, a collection of brilliant digital artists from the MakerBot Community will be graciously welcomed by the Met in New York City to study, capture, and recreate pieces from the Met’s vast collection of art and artifacts. These artists – stay tuned and we’ll tell you who! – will capture significant works into the digital domain using Autodesk’s 123D Catch, clean up and manipulate the resulting models, and then produce replicas and original pieces of art on our 3rd generation 3D printer, The Replicator.

Read the rest of this entry »