Edward Snowden has become like the mythical hydra: Cut off one of his heads and a hundred will be 3-D printed in its place.
It's been a month since anonymous artists surreptitiously and illegally erected a 4-foot, bronze-plated bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park, only to see police remove it hours later. But the artists behind the guerrilla project have found a new way to share Snowden's head with the masses: They've uploaded a 3-D printable file of the bust to Thingiverse, the world's largest repository of 3-D printable files, so that anyone can download it, print it, and seed Snowden heads of all sizes and colors around the world.
"We thought, 'Let’s put the data out there, and find a way for it to proliferate to anyone who wants it,'" says Andrew Tider, who along with fellow artist Jeff Greenspan had remained anonymous until being outed by a police summons to retrieve the massive Snowden head earlier this week. "We've heard from people that they want one for their lawn or to put in their home ... so we're letting the world do whatever it wants to do with this."
In a note on their upload to Thingiverse, the artists warn that the sculpture still isn't entirely optimized for fused deposit modeling, (FDM) the common method of 3-D printing used by printers like those sold by Makerbot or Stratasys, as opposed to more expensive forms of 3-D printing like selective laser sintering. But they promise that a more FDM-friendly version of the file is coming soon.
The artists, each fined $50 for illegally entering Brooklyn's Fort Greene Park after hours to install the illegal statue, say they're not explicitly suggesting people 3-D print and plant Snowden busts in parks or other public places. But Greenspan admits he'd be excited to see copycat shrines to Snowden appear around the country or the world. "It would be great if people put these in public spaces and Instagrammed them, or put photos on Twitter and Facebook to project them around the world," says Greenspan. "Anywhere it can get people thinking about surveillance, your rights and liberties, it would be wonderful."
It wouldn't be the first time they'd inspired imitators. On the very day police removed the original bust, a second group of artists placed a Snowden hologram atop the pedestal from which the statue had been removed.
Greenspan and Tider were careful to record a high resolution digital model of their original bust before creating its final cast. After sculptor Doyle Tankina moulded the bust from clay, it was scanned with a walk-around handheld scanner, then used to create a casting mould. (Tankina notes that he used WIRED's cover photo of Snowden as a model for some portions of the sculpture. "I definitely studied that photograph," says Tankina. "It was instrumental in doing the hair.")
The original Snowden bust was then cast in fiberglass and concrete, finished in bronze, and planted on a pedestal in a pre-dawn operation in early April. Within hours, it was shrouded and then seized by police, but Greenspan and Tider recovered from a city storage facility earlier this week. They plan to install it in Boiler, a gallery in Brooklyn.
The 3-D printable file, first published by Animal New York, is already gaining attention from fellow artists. "omg so many ideas for this 3d model of the snowden bust," tweeted artist Kyle Mcdonald Thursday. He followed up with this:
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The Brooklyn bust isn't the only statue of him to appear in recent weeks. Another was recently installed in Berlin, alongside figures of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. A 9-foot mobile statue of Snowden has been touring New York parks. This isn't even the first 3-D printable version of the world's most famous NSA whistleblower uploaded to Thingiverse. It follows the work of McGill University professor Gabriella Coleman to create Gnowden, a Snowden gnome designed to be printed and photographed around the world.
Greenspan and Tider say they created their Snowden bust project not simply to lionize Snowden, but to counter mainstream media portrayals of Snowden as a "traitor"---and to question the notion of popular heroes in society. "We accept sometimes without thinking that if there’s a bronze statue of some person, they must be good," says Greenspan. "We wanted to raise this question, whether the people you’ve been told are heroes are heroes or whether your enemies are really enemies … How your ideas are being massage and manipulated."
3-D printing, of course, makes it possible for anyone to decide whose head is worthy of a heroic bust. And the two artists hope that publishing their 3-D printable file will result in many more miniature monuments to Snowden sprouting on desktops and mantel places around the world. "You can decide who you revere," says Greenspan. "It can be a reminder to be a little skeptical about who to follow and who to fear."
