How 3D Printing Can Preserve History - Tech+Art | Genius: Picasso

The genius is a word that gets used so much more feminine. I've always found that word very problematic. I'm here to change that. Here we are. I was doing a lot of 3D animation and 3D modeling, but just like seeing something that you modeled in a virtual space coming to life from its digital space to a physical space layer by layer, I just thought, "That's crazy that you can just do that."

I was doing a lot of research around how oil relates to both jihad, but also to capitalism. Then, the video of ISIS destroying artifacts at the Michonne museum came out. I was like, "Okay, how can I relate this?" Because everything that I'm reading right now, everything that I'm working on, is about this like right destruction, and how the 3D printer didn't become this machine that reversed these...

We were creating them based on images. Once I started to do research on these artifacts that were destroyed, I realized that there was such a lack of information about them. I contacted so many historians or scholars that specifically work on hats, raw, or Massoud. I wanted to find a way to share that, to give access both to kind of the sculptures but also to this information that I gathered.

So, inside each artifact, there is a memory card and a flash drive that is embedded that contains all the information: PDF files, images, videos, even my email correspondence with different scholars. The more people read about it, the more people printed those pieces, the more people that have been saved on their computers, the more these things will get saved and remembered.

I was really interested in figuring out what materials I could use that would be the closest to the original material, which was like actually like a stone—more like dense material. Right? I just thought resin would be cool because it almost looks like a ghost of these objects. I've only seen at that point the object in a digital space, in a virtual space, and then seeing it in a physical space is a very different experience.

So, I just remember opening the door of the 3D printer and having this thing printed, but it would be so much like support material around that. So, it almost felt like dug in the ground. It was very like archeological in some ways. There's really no way to replace these objects that were destroyed. To me, that's where the beauty of that project was when I could just use the technology to archive something that was meant to be lost or destroyed.

All the stories of superheroes are 99% about men. We have like very little figures that are superheroes that are women. I was looking to find these female dark goddess figures, different mythical narratives based in the Middle East, bringing them back—not just reappropriation; they're the form and sculpture, but also refiguring their stories.

If you want to imagine other kinds of futures, I think you need new figures, new stories, new histories to use as a point of departure. I obviously like new technologies; I have a lot of hope around that and what's possible with it. But I also think there's like a very dark side of it, which is that who gets to have access to both technology and use it in what way. But also, you can make small changes. I really, really do believe in the power of micro changes for macro influence.