Friday, November 30, 2018
Museum Aims To Be A Model For Making Collections Available Via 3D Printing
WVXU: The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site in Indianapolis was one of the first museums to offer free 3D printing of its art collection, all in an effort to make it more accessible to the public. It now hopes to be a model for other museums around the country.
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9 comments:
I am interested to learn more about how exactly this works and how they are distributing these 3D printings. I think the idea behind it is genuine, giving more people access to art than they do now, but I'm a little confused on how they plan to get 3D printings to these people. I understand that the art might be smaller scale, but how much will they cost? I would imagine that buying a ticket to the museum would be cheaper than buying a 3D print. Also, will the museum be the ones manufacturing theses printings or do they expect people to 3D print the artwork themselves by making the files available to print? Overall, I think this can be beneficial if we figure out the questions of how we will be distributing these 3d printings and how they market the product itself. I would be interested to hear from the consumer in this situation.
Interactive engagement in museums and with historical artifacts is important and exciting. Being able to 3-D print so that students who are more kinesthetic in their learning as well visually impaired people is super important. It allows for more engagement for the student not to just remember “yeah we went to some dead guy’s house” you can use the puzzle of the 3D printed statuette to help students have a more hands on experience to remember who that some dead guy was. Also, allowing access to things that might not be safe in typical viewing methods at museums by using 3D printed artifacts helps us all learn more. Hopefully as this becomes bigger, they are able to find new ways to make these more accessible to students across the nation and are able to promote and encourage learning in this way. I have a mission of collecting stamps from all the Founding Father’s homes and if I were able to sit in their homes and not touch, say, Alexander Hamilton’s actual writing desk, but a 3D printed version so I could understand how he used it better, that would be amazing. Or any number of the other artifacts I have been able to see at these sights.
Overall I think this is an excellent way for museums around the country to motivate patrons to see the work. I wonder if making an “eCollection” available to the public causes an increase in museum traffic. I think it would be flat-out wrong to have a 3D printed scale model of an artifact and not have any desire to see the real thing. Not only would you expect it to strike up interest in the public eye but it essentially acts as free advertisement for the museum and the exhibits they hold.
I would be very interested to see the data that is associated with the implementation of 3D rendering and how it directly correlates to museum numbers. This can also act as an opportunity to create maker spaces in museums for patrons to print pieces right on site to take home as a souvenir. This revolutionary idea is catering to a generation that grew up with this technology and has implemented 3D printing technology into their everyday lives.
This is a pretty cool idea. I popped over to the Smithsonian’s website to see what they are doing with their vast and largely fascinating collection. There are many 3D computer models available for inspection online, but you can only print a couple dozen. That makes sense, considering the first thing that popped into my head: this whole idea has major copyright and intellectual property issues. The statue that the Harrison museum is printing was created by an artist, and although I am sure the museum passed through the appropriate channels, I’m sure it’s still tricky to get the rights for reproduction. And they’re asking people everywhere to print pieces of the statue so they can have a life-sized model, which complicates the issue further. Not to mention that this particular endeavor (in my opinion, at least) is perhaps the most boring possible application for the idea. The museum wants to let people touch and manipulate artifacts without damaging them, so they come up with the idea to 3D print them, but their banner project is...a statue of a person.
This is actually really cool. Being able to 3D print artifacts seems like a huge new educational tool for relatively cheap. I imagine school teacher will be utilizing this technology quite a bit to help their students interact with and understand history. It should be talked about however, that even though 3D printing is getting cheaper and cheaper, there are still not a lot of places that have access to one. But I do think this is a great first step in the right direction. I also think this program could do a lot for the visually impaired who want a more robust exam experience. I know that sometimes fine art museums do a 3-D print of paintings for people to run their hands over. I imagine this program is another method of achieving that. It’s exciting to see the Smithsonian is on board. I can’t wait to see who else will join.
I feel different ways about this. I appreciate that this is making art more accessible for a larger audience, and especially that technology allows for it to be an exact replication, instead of just an imitation. However, I worry that this will allow museums to replicate artifacts for display purposes, and not feel the need to tell their patrons. I know that this is a bit of a stretch, it just seems like a really easy way to put a 3D printed facsimile of the artwork up, instead of the real thing, in order to preserve the original. To me, that is part of why these artifacts have such value. They are not going to last forever, and are transient. No one will ever be able to create another Mona Lisa, there will never be another Monet, Degas, Cezanne, etc. Appreciate this art while it is here. I think it is a wonderful idea for teaching and recreational purposes, and for children to learn about artwork, but I hesitate to make museums think that using them as stand-ins for real artwork. Additionally, on a petty level, they need to make their video more engaging if this is to promote the 3D sculptures they are so excited about introducing to the public.
I think this is a really cool idea that I never imagined would come from 3D printing technology. I have seen countless technical forums with all sorts of little gadgets and pieces that people have shared so that anyone with 3D printing capabilities can plug in and print out. I think that is such a useful network, especially with the rise in accessible 3D printing technology to the average person, and lets people with a printer but not necessarily 3D drafting skills to still use it and be able to do some cool things. I think making art available to print will be a really cool thing, but I do wonder about copyright and if anyone will run into any sort of legal hiccups with this. Since no 3D printer can really completely recreate art, I don't think this will be too much of a problem, and I am excited to see where this goes.
Indiana doesn’t have a lot of claims to fame- aside from the Indy 500, President Benjamin Harrison is about as exciting as it gets in terms of Indiana heritage. I was excited to see this article because I know my elementary school, along with most of the others in the area, takes its students on a field trip to this every year, and for a second grader it is completely forgettable and fairly boring. Incorporating 3D printing into this historical site is a really interesting idea to make history more accessible and more hands-on. It’s a really interesting concept of blending history and future technology. I do wonder how accessible it will end up being- I know my elementary/middle school has a 3D printer, but many of the other schools in the area do not, limiting the experience only to the one on-site. I still think this is a very interesting concept that I imagine could be adopted by other historical sites as well.
I think that this is a good approach to creating more accessibility to the public. Many recreations are so incredibly expensive because of the process that is involved in making those re-creations, especially from pieces in which there have previously not be re-creations before. 3D scanning and printing technology has come such a long way that this is actually a fairly feasible idea that can help to teach, and expose so many to historical pieces of great significance. While it does in a way ignore the beauty of the actual processes, it opens doors that might not others wise be open. I think it can be used tactfully.
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