A Dream of Art for Everyone: Digitizing the Met!
Today a dream is coming true for me. I’m in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a crew of artists and we’re scanning the artwork here, we’re sharing them, and we’re hacking on them.
You can follow along here on the MakerBot blog, the MakerBot Twitter, follow the #MET3D hashtag and the newest things on Thingiverse.
I was an art teacher in Seattle Public Schools and with my students I could only get them to a museum once a year. Together we would get on a bus, go get a tour of a museum and go back to school.
It was great to go to a museum, but it was limited. I had a wish then that I could bring the museum into the classroom. Little did I know that 6 years later, I would be in the Metropolitan Museum of Art with some of the best artists and designers in the world scanning art and sharing it on Thingiverse for the world to download and make. We’re taking it even farther than that though. I don’t think I imagined that the work could be changed, mashed-up, hacked, and remade. It is truly a brilliant and wonderful future we live in where you can go into a museum that allows photography, take lots of pictures and then use 123D Catch to turn it into a model and share it on Thingiverse.