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There’s Something Fishy About The Other Nefertiti | The Great Fredini’s Cabinet of Curiosities

The New York Times and countless other news outlets picked up on a story that’s been making the rounds of the 3D printing community the last few weeks; Swiping a Priceless Antiquity … With a Scanner and a 3-D Printer tells the story of two artists; Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, who apparently succeeded in making a massive digital art heist when they surreptitiously scanned Nefertiti’s bust in Berlin’s Neues Museum. It’s great art commentary with many levels; It talks to issues around digital copy vs. originals, who is allowed to own these copies, and going deeper, questions the museum’s right to own the statue which rightfully should belong to Egypt. By releasing the files for The Other Nefertiti free online as a torrent, the artists have initiated a huge debate with many layers. The 3D Printing community is not without its debate about this work either. The video the artists share that shows them sneaking a kinect scan from beneath Ms. Badri’s scarf raises a lot of questions as to whether the artists even scanned the artifact as they claim. […]

The last possibility and reigning theory is that Ms. Badri and Mr. Nelles elusive hacker partners are literally real hackers who stole a copy of the high resolution scan from the Museum’s servers. A high resolution scan must exist as a high res 3D printed replica is already available for sale online. Museum officials have dismissed the Other Nefertiti model as “of minor quality”, but that’s not what we are seeing in this highly detailed scan. Perhaps the file was obtained from someone involved in printing the reproduction, or it was a scan made of the reproduction? Indeed, the common belief in online 3D Printing community chatter is that the Kinect “story” is a fabrication to hide the fact that the model was actually stolen data from a commercial high quality scan. If the artists were behind a server hack, the legal ramifications for them are much more serious than scanning the object, which has few, if any legal precedents.

[See earlier post for background…]