Hasta La Ideas

Earlier this year, Barcelona’s blablabLab piloted an attraction called “Be Your Own Souvenir” on Las Ramblas, the main tourist thoroughfare in the city they call home. It’s essentially the ‘Souvenir Penny’ 2.0: lucky tourists posed for three Kinect sensors to generate a full-body scan, which is translated into a 3D-printed figurine of said tourist.

For two weekends in January, “Be Your Own Souvenir” demonstrated the potential for new technology to invert the relationship between artist and audience: “spectator-performer, artist-tourist, observer-object.”

The user becomes the producer as well as the consumer through a system that invites him/her to perform as a human statue, with a free personal souvenir as a reward: a small figure of him/herself printed three-dimensionally from a volumetric reconstruction of the person generated by the use of three structured light scanners (kinect)… The project mimics the informal artistic context of this popular street, human sculptures and craftsmen, bringing diverse realities and enabling greater empathy between the agents that cohabit in the public space.

Video after the jump:

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