First, we planned to set abstract theories of the self in conversation with reflections on how particular social identities shape who we are.

For a year prior, the two of us had been developing an undergraduate course at our institution, Yale University, called “Selfhood, Race, Class, and Gender.” The course had two aims.

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Meet some devoted faculty members who might spark your interest in taking risks and trying new things in class. Oddly enough, the imperfection of 3-D printers and scanners also answered the question we had brought to the workshop: Would we be able to use such technologies in a humanities classroom without reducing them to a sideshow or gimmick? We were drawn in by this experience: Two inconceivably distant media and periods had unexpectedly touched borders, and illuminated each other. Indeed, as we took turns holding the plastic head and taking pictures of it, we felt that its computer-generated zigzag edges were helping us understand how far the object reproduced had traveled in order to reach us, and how intense and fragile was the manual labor it originally involved. The two forms of roughness - historical and printer-induced - did not clash with each other. The other part had to do with what our workshop instructors described as “pixelation.” When their equipment scanned and reproduced the sculpture, some of the detail got lost, resulting in a three-dimensional equivalent of a grainy photograph. Part of what made this plastic copy misshapen and uneven was the damage that the original artifact had weathered over millennia. By layering thin strips of this plastic, the printer had reproduced the sculpted head from a composite, many-sided scan. It was a copy of an Assyrian artifact remade from a 3-D printer in strangely light, off-white plastic.

M idway through a workshop aimed at demystifying 3-D printing and other new technologies, we were handed a small, roughly hewn representation of a human head.

Autodesk memento 3 dimensions