A couple of short posts from Wellington-based artist Bronwyn Holloway-Smith has me revisiting my skepticism about 3d printing. I guess somewhere in the past I put it in the too hard to conceptualize basket and have only now come to to rethink that.

Ghosts in the form of gifts provides some lovely examples of using printing to recreate lost objects using images and information.

It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up is a short review of an article by the same name, and touches on the potential tension between people creating objects and the owners of the intellectual property behind the objects.

Someone may have mentioned it at NDF recently. We’re heading towards a world where copying things won’t just be copying a bit of music or some digital tv shows, but you’ll be able to make a 3d model of sculpture, objet d’art, or any kind of object.

And the tools for making them will only get better. Take this Te Papa record of a taha huahua (calabash). There are enough  images of it for someone, anywhere, to recreate it. What IP owners and guardians of cultural taonga will make of it remains to be seen, but right now it’s inevitability is fairly compelling.

For more on re-use, appropriation, creativity, and intellectual property, try this New York Times article, Apropos Appropriation.