On the night of March 18, 1990, a pair of thieves disguised as Boston police officers entered the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and roamed the museum’s galleries, stealing thirteen works of art.

Perhaps the biggest property theft in recorded history, this 1990 theft of paintings including Rembrandt’s only known seascape, remains unsolved. Holy shhhhhmoly! That sounds more like a movie plot¹ , than something that could have happened in the 90′s.

It’s Day 2 at the Met MakerBot Hackathon and everyone’s down to work on their new art, and it’s crazy to think that we’re at this point. Because here’s the thing: we thought we’d have to come in and “steal” this stuff, until the Met listened to the idea and got excited about it and helped us take it a few steps further.

The idea of an art heist has still been tossed around. Let’s face it: heists make good stories. It’s good drama about a few people against a big group and you start cheering for the underdog. But what you never see in the movies is all the people who won’t see that art because of some trickery.

Food for thought:

•  Just last year, a drawing by Picasso was stolen from a gallery in San Francisco. The gallery’s president, Rowland Weinstein, said his “greatest fear” was that “the person will realize it’s unsellable and will dispose of it in a less-than-proper manner.”

•  The frames of the stolen pieces from the Gardener Museum, mentioned above, are still hanging empty on the walls, just waiting for the art to return.

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1. actually that does sound a lot like the end of The Town [↩]

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)

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!

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.

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