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from the let-the-industrial-espionage-begin dept.
In February, two artists, Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles – claimed to have scanned the bust of Nefertiti in a German history museum using a handheld Kinect Sensor. They then posted the digital files online.
Their goal, they said, was to free the statue from its imprisonment inside the walls of Berlin's Neues Museum by enabling anyone with access to a 3D printer to make their own near-perfect replica – a Nefertiti for all.
Al-Badri and Nelles saw their caper as an act of cultural liberation. It was a gesture against what they believe to be a legacy of colonial theft and appropriation, in which the goods of one nation or culture – in this case, Egypt – ended up in the museums and storerooms of another.
But the stunt illustrated another possibility: the indirect heist. Instead of stealing the thing itself, you can just pilfer the set of parameters – the metadata – that define it.
Why steal the actual bust of Nefertiti when you can instead easily nab the measurements to fabricate a new one? You would not have the original but you would have the peculiar wealth that comes with possessing a potentially infinite number of exact copies.
[Related]: Cosmo Wenman has been scanning and releasing digital files of artefacts housed in the British Museum
(Score: 2) by FrogBlast on Thursday May 12 2016, @03:37PM
I was hoping someone would mention the debunking article. At best, the video they posted is fake, possibly intended to cover for a source inside the museum who passed data to them. The Kinect isn't capable of the fine detail in the finished model, and the angle they're depicted as using it at would have missed large parts of the bust during scanning.