Last month, two artists grabbed headlines across the world by announcing that they had snuck a hacked Kinect Sensor into the Neues Museum in Berlin and done a guerrilla 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a precious artwork from ancient Egypt. Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles called their work The Other Nefertiti and released their data file to world. Now anyone can have an incredibly high-quality reproduction of the sculpture, or remix it to make new artworks. But immediately, experts raised questions about the scan—it was just too high quality for a Kinect. Al-Badri and Nelles inflamed speculation when they refused to share more details about their scanning techniques…
Cosmo Wenman, an artist who actually has done guerrilla 3D reproductions of classical art using high-quality digital photos, told Ars that he was immediately suspicious about the Nefertiti scan. Most likely, he said, the artists had been given a version of the Neues Museum’s own 3D scans, possibly by a museum worker or a third party who did the scans for the museum. In a fascinating article on his site, Wenman compares stills from the museum’s scan with the scan from The Other Nefertiti. He writes, “In my opinion, it’s highly unlikely that two independent scans of the bust would match so closely. It seems even less likely that a scan of a replica would be such a close match. I believe the model that the artists released was in fact derived from the Neues Museum’s own scan.”
via Ars Technica
Image: Nefertiti Hack
