In our use it made sense to start with the Sensory Tour, our monthly tour for visitors with visual impairments as well as anyone who wants to experience art using more than just their sense of sight.  We continually had great success using raised line drawings (they’re just what they sound like; the lines are literally raised from the surface of the paper) to help people feel contours of two-dimensional art.  Why not try the same thing with one more dimension in the mix?

It took some creative thinking and interdepartmental teamwork to figure out an appropriate object and Lost Pleiad hit all the right marks. So, armed with a few 3D prints of Randolph Rogers’ sculpture in our teaching bag, we hit the galleries in the capable teaching hands of Megan Holland and Brigitte Moreno to “explore lines of ink on paper, lines of movement, and lines of poetry in our most recent exhibition, Fine Lines: American Drawings from the Brooklyn Museum.”

So, how did it go, you’re probably wondering?  Did having these touchable models deepen participants’ engagement with the artwork?  Did people walk away feeling like they’d had a satisfying tactile experience with this sculpture?  Is 3D printing going to usurp the place of the statue in museums?  These are all things that were on the minds of the educators as we stepped into this new semi-charted territory.

As with most complicated issues, the results were mixed. Visitors were visibly, physically excited by the prospect of our inclusion of this technology.  They paid careful, detailed attention to the surface of the sculpture and all of its contours. They held up the 3D models and compared them to the original sculpture in front of them.

They looked at the 3D prints from all angles (more than they were able to do with the original, and not unlike the animation commenter Sebastian Heath made from the Thingiverse files David shared in his last post).

During this Sensory Tour, we also passed around samples of marble in various finishes and scarves to think about the contrast between the dense stone and the diaphanous fabric.  People gave them similar amounts of time and attention as they had the 3D prints, but the stone and scarves seemed to spark a wider variety of conversation and brought people’s focus back to the sculpture more quickly.  Not that this is all on the technology, of course, but as educators we’re pretty comfortable using material like the stone samples and scarves to get quality audience conversation going.

The 3D prints are new tools for us to play with, and we need to work with them more to get more comfortable. What are the best kinds of questions to ask people when we put these into their hands?  As blogged about by Alastair Somerville, does it work better to manipulate the image for emphasis, rather than staying strictly true to the original?

In our post-game conversation, the education team behind the Sensory Tours agreed that 3D prints are great tools to help people feel the weight and balance of a sculpture.  They’re “a new way of making lines; a digital brushstroke,” said one educator, and since this month’s Sensory Tour was focused on lines, we couldn’t think of a better place in starting this project.

As part of an internal program within the Technology department, we’ve started a series of developer led R&D projects; developers propose what they want to experiment with and we set aside time in our busy work week to foster that creativity. In our first round of experiments David Huerta wanted to work with 3D printing; he’s incredibly passionate about this and has been following the 3D printing projects in the industry and beyond.

Irwin S. Chanin (American, 1891-1988). Double Pegasus from the Coney Island High Pressure Pumping Station, 2301 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn, 1936-1937. Limestone, granite, 48 x 24 x 48 in. (121.9 x 61.0 x 121.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Lent by The City of New York, L2003.7.2.

I’ll say I needed some convincing; even in asking the team to experiment, my own thoughts tend to take me toward practical applications and, while 3D printing is whiz bang cool and a lot of people had ideas for applications, we just were not seeing much materialize just yet.  But, you never know where a project can lead you, so David started his project by working with the Double Pegasus—an object from Coney Island which greets visitors in our sculpture garden.

David Huerta with his 3D print of the Double Pegasus.

When he showed up with his 3D print, we were pretty excited and that little physical simulacrum got me thinking about practical applications and how something like this might be used to help our educators with their own goals in helping visitors who are blind or partially sighted.  After speaking with Rachel Ropeik in our Education department, she immediately saw the possibilities and wanted to experiment; David and Rachel are now working on a cross-departmental project to bring 3D printed objects into our series of Sensory Tours.

We consider this a fast, iterative project that aims to get the output right into our visitors hands as we report back on our findings.  We’ve had plenty of bumps in the road—just finding an object that was appropriate for their tour combined with our own ability to capture it was challenging. In the coming week or two, David will blog a lot more on the technical ins and outs of the project and Rachel will be reporting about education goals and visitor reaction. The Double Pegasus is just the start.