This next video shows is a helmet I designed using my 3D capture of the British Museum’s over-life-size marble bust of Perikles. I didn’t get a good capture because the lighting in the gallery was a challenge, but I got good enough results that I could digitally separate the helmet from the marble, then design it directly using that capture as a template. I was able to recreate a 3D print of an artifact that has never been discovered. It was also on display in the Louvre expo hall at the 2013 Paris 3D Printshow:

I don’t think people are responding to pieces like this as 3D prints for 3D printing’s sake—not like novelties coming out of a trendy new technology. I see people responding to the objects in a way that demonstrates the objects’ emotional appeal. People want to put their hands on them, hold them, pick them up, and even walk away with them. Or print their own.

3D Printing as Network Phenomenon

That brings up another important aspect of 3D printing that’s not necessarily obvious in popular press accounts—but which I think is possibly its most important characteristic: this is a networked machine. 3D printing is an internet phenomenon.

We’re dealing with digital design, which is fully fluid and can propagate endlessly and be limitlessly reproduced over and over again. It can be modified over and over. We’re in the early stages of something potentially as potent as the way the internet allows text to be digitized and go online, with themes and ideas and original writing reworked into new and novel iterations.

Because the designs are digital, the online, networked nature of 3D capture and printing is where the real power and potential for influence is with 3D printing, and we’re in the very early stages of a combinatorial explosion of novelty and creativity in design and sculptural artwork.

The internet is where museums, as design custodians, have their biggest opportunity to make use of 3D printing. If you engage the potential of 3D capture and 3D printing in the online arena, the network effects inherent in the interconnectedness of 3D printers—these digital design input and output terminals—is what will allow you to experiment with potentially exponential growth in influence.

Which collectors and institutions publish first, and which objects they publish, how they prioritize them and present it all—how they explain its meaning and significance, and how easy they make it to obtain—will make an indelible mark on how all this potential is realized, how it is perceived and unfolds. And once sculptural artworks are digitized and put online, they can be available for many, many years to come. This technological moment marks the start of something that may be very, very long lived and influential, and the early adopters have an opportunity to wield unprecedented influence on the coming hundreds of years of art history.

Ancient Designs in the Wild

In these cases I’ve shown so far—Perikles’ helmet and the Venus de Milo—these were just particular instances of physical iterations that 3D printing has allowed me to make. But I’ve shared almost all of these designs, and that enables other people to take the files and print them to their own specifications.

Here are some examples of prints others have made for themselves using my data, just in the last six weeks since I published the Venus de Milo and the Nike of Samothrace.

Why are they doing this if not because they recognize the beauty or the value or meaning inherent in these designs?

They print them in different materials, different sizes, with different resolutions, making different comparative analyses. These are people who have creative talent, creative know-how, who just want access to the basic palette of our common cultural heritage of 3D design—the basic building blocks for all sorts of unanticipated experimentation that people will be doing if they’re given access to these designs.

Here’s a tweet about an article in The Independent about my publication of Venus de Milo. This kind of response is fairly representative, and it’s from someone who doesn’t even have a 3D printer:

People already love these designs. They know about them. And when they know that they’re available, they want them. And 3D scanning and 3D printing can allow them to have them. My captures are the first high-quality models of Venus de Milo and Winged Victory that have ever been published—people now have direct access to their forms for the first time. And in first six weeks of their publication, their files had been downloaded 30,000 times.

Here is a model of a marble portrait of Alexander the Great at the British Museum. This is the same print that I’ve brought today, in two iterations—with a bronze patina and with a rusted iron patina to make it look like industrial wreckage—and it’s what we’re printing right now on the demo machine here:

We’re printing out a 2,000 year old design that anyone with an internet connection can directly access for the first time, ever.

People of means—even fictional people—have been collecting plaster copies of this Alexander portrait for as long as they have been available. Here’s a frame from one of the Indiana Jones movies, with Alexander there in the background. And now that design has been released into the wild, and anyone can have it, and they don’t need me or anyone else to tell them what to do with it, or any other designs. More prints of my captures, by other 3D printer users:

It’s interesting to me to see people doing test prints or demonstrations using the Venus de Milo, or a torso by Polyclitus, or other archetypal designs. It doesn’t have to be the Stanford Bunny, or the Utah Tea Pot that they’re using to show what they can do. They’re printing sculpture to show the quality of the print, using iconic, foundational designs to say “Hello world, I have this new power, this is what I can do with it.” These 3D printer users seem to know these works are significant, and that their ability to access and reproduce them is equally significant and promising.

Question from LACMA staff: In the video [a slightly different version] the [redacted] piece is the first piece that’s modern. There aren’t copyright issues? That’s why I thought you confined yourself to antiquities.

I have a couple of pieces I could have been more careful about with copyright, but mostly I’m dealing with antiquities. I’ve done a couple pieces that I probably shouldn’t speak about in public while the camera is recording. But you’re right, and that’s one exception you were looking for, and you caught it…

LACMA: Some people here have had experiences…

I’m sure. This is something you’re going to have to deal with as museums, with your photography policies, with outdoor artwork. The fact is that everybody is carrying a camera these days, so I don’t know that I have any good solutions to recommend to you. The fact is that right now people can absolutely make crude to medium quality copies of things using very inexpensive equipment. And that capability is only going to get more powerful and diffuse. That’s all very much going to be on the table here, how museums deal with these issues. And I’m not sure that there are going to be satisfactory answers, or at least that everyone will be satisfied with those answers.

But there’s a way you can take control of some of this. The real power that you have available, as custodians of beauty and design, is in enabling people to have access to it directly. So as a technology lab, as a forward-thinking institution, it would be great if LACMA had a bank of 3D printers here so people could use them and experiment with them inside the museum, but it shouldn’t stop at that.

The real opportunity is with others’ 3D printers, with the manufacturing capability that’s going to be in more and more people’s hands, outside of the museum. And the way to communicate with them is to share the data—to collect the data and freely share it with them.

Prioritization

You’ll see that institutions like the Smithsonian are getting a lot of attention because they’re starting to actually publish 3D designs of objects in their collection. Personally, I’m a little underwhelmed with the quantity that they have published so far, and also by the designs that they have published—they aren’t exactly the greatest hits.

But if you at LACMA were to contemplate taking 3D captures of your works, you would face the same question the Smithsonian faces, which is what do we start with? What’s most important to get out first, what’s the most important to invest the time and effort in making the 3D capture and publishing?

I feel strongly that you should start with the most important works, your most famous works, your most well-known works. Because, for starters, those will be the most well-received. People will be the most appreciative to see beautiful designs that they’re already familiar with and love.

But from a strategic and practical point of view, I would encourage you to consider starting with works of which there are already multiple copies distributed out in the world. That might be a little counterintuitive, but if you have a very unique piece in your collection, I would defer capturing and publishing those. I would jump on capturing and publishing works where there are already either exact copies or very similar subject matter out there in other museums collections, or in private hands.

That is because of the kind of work I was able to do in September 2013, when I spent a week in a plaster cast museum in Switzerland—the Skulpturhalle Basel, which is one of the few remaining plaster cast collections with a sizable collection of plaster casts from the 1800s. I found a friendly museum that embraces the experimental and educational functions of copyism, and they allowed me to capture whatever I chose. It’s where I captured Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, from plaster casts the Louvre’s own atelier made in 1850 and 1892—capturing identical topology without any interaction with the Louvre at all.

This is a 3D print of a 19th century plaster cast of an Athena of Velletri-type bust. There are several surviving iterations from antiquity of this essential form. The original from which this cast was made is in the Munich Glyptothek. But I was able to capture its topology in the Swiss plaster cast museum.

The Lansdowne Bust

Once I publish my survey of this cast—which I have not yet done—I may thereby degrade interest in a survey of its ancestor in Munich, which could only produce the same topology. Though there are differences between the two pieces, it’s even possible that in publishing my survey of the Swiss cast of the Munich bust, I will undermine interest in any future survey of the Lansdowne Bust of Athena of Velletri here at LACMA.

Along those lines, I want you to be most aware of this dynamic as it relates to bronzes, particularly modern era bronzes that are in the public domain. The manufacture of bronze of course entails molds being made. There are also frequently clay originals and plaster copies in existence that survive alongside the finished bronzes. And there are usually multiple original bronzes cast.

I visited LACMA here a couple weeks ago to do a surreptitious 3D capture in your gallery of Picasso’s 1909 bronze Head of a Woman. The lighting in the gallery was less than ideal, and I wasn’t able to get behind the piece as well as I would have liked, and the back of the piece is very dark. The result, here, is a very low quality print.

However, there is a plaster of that same piece in Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and it looks like it’s very well lit. There’s a plaster in the Tate. There are multiple bronzes of this piece scattered around the world.

LACMA, Nasher, Tate

If another museum, or I, or anyone else makes a very nice quality 3D capture of that piece, whether it’s the Tate’s, the Nasher’s, the Art Institute Chicago’s, the Met’s, or LACMA’s, the first person to publish a very high quality capture of that piece will likely be the last person to do so. Because there will be no interest in a second high-quality capture of a second bronze cast with the exact same topology.

So, if and when you start contemplating how to prioritize which pieces to capture and publish, you should know that there’s a race that’s already underway. There are already museums that have very sophisticated 3D capture capabilities and that are already actively doing 3D captures of their most valuable and most well-known pieces. They’re just not sharing them yet. But if you look at your galleries here at LACMA—with bronze portraits by Matisse and Picasso, Degas dancers, Rodins—there are multiple casts of those in other museums all over the world, and they too will soon be thinking about what to scan and publish, and thinking about who will be first, who will stake out this frontier and make these pieces more accessible, to more people, than has ever before been possible. And that distinction will be awarded, at most, once per piece.

Digital Patronage

It occurs to me that there might be the potential for some very intriguing fundraising here. There might be patrons of the arts out there who might like to be involved in sponsoring the capture and publication of archival quality 3D captures of Rodins, Degas, Matisses, and publishing that data under their name: The LACMA 2014 Archival Quality 3D model of Rodin/Degas/etc, made possible by insert-name-here.

If there’s any potential for that kind of fundraising—raising funds for digitizing and publishing such works into the wild, into the public domain—if you or other museums take a wait-and-see approach with it, I believe what you’ll ultimately see is other museums making your fundraising opportunities evaporate, piece by piece. Because once a bronze’s data is out there, nobody will want or need or notice the data of an identical cast.

The Smithsonian, for example, is actively capturing lots of stuff. But when they talk about what they’re capturing, they don’t usually talk about Rodin, or Degas. For now it’s mostly fossils and interesting Americana. They don’t talk about high-profile works, or modern era artwork, even if it’s in the public domain. But the Hirshhorn has bronzes that you have, and they have access to very high quality technology…

Comment from LACMA staff: Rodins and Degas would be, for objects in the public domain, they could represent good fundraising potential, but I think once you start copying works that are still copyrighted… and as you said, this could drastically change our photography policies. Once you allow—we have a very open photography policy in our galleries—but once you have a situation where you’ve got people taking lots of capture photos, and then going out and making their own Giacometti, you’ve got a problem on your hands.

Well, I’ll tell you, there are already people walking around museums with cameras and even Google Glass taking 3D surveys of objects that are not necessarily in the public domain. In fact, I’ll show you another technique that people are actively exploring, which will be very problematic for photography policies, but which is it far too late to do anything about…

Here’s the colossal Buddha of Bamiyan that was destroyed by the Taliban, photogrammetrically reconstructed exclusively from photographs culled from online sources.

Video demo by Autodesk

This approach is in its infancy, and has only produced very crude results, but this kind of capability is only going to get more powerful and less expensive. And the fact is, there are hundreds and thousands of photographs online of every notable work, public domain or not, and they are open to this mode of analysis and reconstruction. So the question, how will museums respond… you could stop photography tomorrow, but there’s already data out there from which to reconstruct the models. For many important works, the data has been leaving your museums for the last hundred years.

And whatever the survey method, policies will likely vary from museum to museum, so for outsiders it becomes a matter of finding the path of least resistance:

These are photos of the Musée d’Orsay’s bronze cast of Rodin’s 1879 Bellona and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts’ cast, thought to be the first or second cast of this work.

The Musée d’Orsay, famously—or infamously, if you ask the photographers who stage protests in its galleries—does not allow photography. But the Cantor does. So I have a 3D capture of the Cantor’s Bellona, and not the Musée d’Orsay’s. And I’m fairly indifferent about whether its source is the Musée d’Orsay or the Cantor bronze—the topology is the same.

See this NPR story for more about my visit to the Cantor Center

Comment from LACMA staff: I don’t understand why this is a fundraising opportunity for museums.

This is just speculation on my part, but it occurs to me that there might be a donor who might like to be associated with, say, one of your particular Degas. They might want to be the person who’s responsible for bestowing a high-quality 3D printable model of a particular Degas on the world, and being credited for having done that new, novel thing that will allow people to share in the patron’s appreciation for that work in a compelling new way.

Question from LACMA staff: Couldn’t you also charge for the image, just like you pay for an app? I mean, you could charge directly, [publish] into the public domain, and publish something and say, if you want it, it’s X number of dollars.

Sure, absolutely. There are many different ways. Some of them are like the Hollywood model, or the music industry model. You’re going to be dealing with many of the same issues. But if you make it economical and easy to get to, and high quality, potentially—hopefully—this stuff will show up, say, in iTunes with revenue going to you on a per-download basis for a model like this. It’s wide open. Personally, I like the idea of museums and patrons making and funding these surveys and just releasing the files for free. To me, that route is more appealing, but I have all sorts of wonderful ideas about how other people should spend their money.