The world’s largest 3D printed installation to be presented in Coney Island Museum
Last year Fred Kahl, a.k.a. the Great Fredini, a Brooklyn-based artist and impresario, started a Kickstarter campaign supporting his Coney Island Scan-A-Rama project, an art project for scanning and producing 3D printed portraits of the crowds of people who come to Coney Island. His aim was to design and 3D print a 1:13 scale copy of Coney Island’s well-known Luna Park, the way it looked a hundred years ago, and inhabit it with portraits from the studio. The project obtained worldwide attention during the summer of 2013, when Kahl made more than $16,000 for Kickstarter campaign to build a “bot farm” to support the enterprise. This year Kahl has already 3D-scanned hundreds of Coney’s residents and visitors who are to be displayed in the installation. This week, Coney Island USA declared the exhibition of the world’s tremendous art installation ever designed with desktop 3D printer technology at the Coney Island Museum.
This lifelike museum exhibition will grow further with the course of the year to recall the elegant art and architecture of Coney Island’s glory days 100 years ago. The show, Thompson & Dundy’s Luna Park: 3D Printed by the Great Fredini, will comprise hundreds of 3D prints, which all in all took over 10,000 hours to print and the installation will occupy the whole gallery of the museum’s recently afresh opened room.
During the last couple of years Kahl’s mind has been preoccupied with 3D printing. He has produced his own custom hardware and the procedure for creating accurate and ideal full body 3D scans with an Xbox Kinect game controller to catching and making the 3D image of his subjects. His Scan-A-Rama 3D portrait studio is nowadays residency of Coney Island USA’s Artist Incubator program and has become leading place of today’s cultural landscape in Coney Island.
These days Kahl is about to introduce the technology to the public. Luna Park occupies a special position in history, it witnessed the technological transformation of the society. That is was matters to us nowadays, as our world is going through the third industrial revolution. This exhibition is also a sign of deep affection and love to Coney Island as it used to be the cultural melting pot and a display for introducing cutting-edge technology as a kind of entertainment. The show opened in the Coney Island Museum on Sunday, May 25. An artist’s reception is scheduled on Sunday, July 6 from 2-6pm. If you are going to visit the area, be sure to have a good look at this wonderful 3D printed installation.