The work that has come out of the Met MakerBot Hackathon has been really ground breaking, especially since it has inspired people who weren’t even with us a couple of weekends ago.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is one of those artists. I posted about him during the Hackathon and it generated a lot of interest about his ideas of “remixing” and “sampling” physical objects.

The video above, “We Met Heads On”,  is a new addition from Matthew, drawing on what has so far been captured with 123D Catch and uploaded to Thingiverse. Here’s the description of the video from the Vimeo page.

This video titled ‘We Met Heads On’ is my remix of the 3D scan hackathon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY organised by Makerbot. The public were invited to scan artifacts to then modify and 3d print derivatives. The files ended up on Thingiverse, giving me access to the scans, in particular ‘decimation study – met heads’ by scotta3d which is a derivative from another thingiverse user tbuser. To continue the lineage of derivatives, I have placed the low-polygon heads from scotta3d into a Processing sketch that distorts the meshes in realtime in response to sound and outputs the modified stl objects. The soundwave is analysed from the streaming audio and used to force the mesh to twist to the strength of the soundwave. Performed and recorded in real-time.

We are going crazy about this video right now. Imagine what could be done with some of these ancient figures, animating them (re-animating them?) to appropriate music. Renaissance sculpture to ancient Greek music, Oceanic sculpture to Oceanic music.

It’s time to make art dance.

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.

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