Be Your Own Souvenir!
2011
"Be Your Own Souvenir!" aims to connect street users, arts and science, linking them to underlying spaces and their own realities. This takes shape through a technological ritual where the audience is released from established roles in a perspective exchange: spectator / performer, artist / tourist, observer / object. The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites them to perform as a human statue, with a personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of themselves, printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured-light scanners.
All the software used in this project is free and open. Custom software has been developed using openFrameworks and openKinect in order to produce a tunable full 360 degree point cloud. Using a midi controller, the three different input point clouds (3 Kinects) can be adjusted in space and resolution. The resulting combined point cloud is processed by Meshlab to produce a mesh reconstruction. Skeinforge takes the mesh, previously cleaned up through Blender, and outputs a gcode file, which can feed a cnc machine.
blablabLAB is a structure for transdisciplinary collaboration. It imagines strategies and creates tools to make society face its complex reality (urban, technologycal, alienated, hyperconsumerist). It works without preset formats or media and following an extropianist philosophy, approaching the knowledge generation, property and diffusion of it, very close to the DIY principles.