The Art of Making a Statue out of your Live Avatar

A Printed Object

The small statues are created by a California company called Figure Prints , whose servers grab the latest avatar data from Live, creating a custom 3D model from that animated single-dimension image, and allow you to pose it any way you like within the limits of the Live avatar.

Once you are happy with the way it looks, you hit "Print" and proprietary software prepares the model for printing. Taking it from a flat image to a small statue involves the work of the computer and printer, and an artist who finishes the process, turning your selection into what's presented as a high-quality collectible.

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The process uses technology that was previously reserved for the manufacturing industry, using rapid prototyping machines to convert three-dimensional computer models into physical objects. The electronic version of your avatar is cut up into more than a thousand very thin slices, and then the printer creates the object by printing it a slice at a time, with all of the slices stacked on top of each other to form the final three dimensional object that they call a FigurePrints Statue -- but is it art?

"I find the process very exciting and legitimate and full of creative potential," says Marisa Repeta, an artist and art teacher from Falmouth, MA. "I think the very idea of three-dimensional is very cool. I think there will be some very clever artists picking this up -- I would be very intrigued to see what people will do with this."

The obvious question was not a simple one: Were these statues art? To get an answer to that question, I felt that it was imperative to put examples into her hands, so that she could feel them as well as see them, and experience them as objects and, just maybe, as art. Here's her critique.

"These are obviously sculptural. For some reason, what is coming to my mind are these little figurines that are mostly animals that are Mexican; they are actually very artistic, these little figurines. A lot of people work digitally and are familiar with that and have fun with it.

"I see a lot of digital art produced and I think it is completely legitimate. The process itself sounds very open-ended, very creative. I look at these and think, 'Well, OK, I wouldn't have thought that it was something that would have come out of that process,'" she explained.

As I suspected, the question of whether or not they were art was not easily answered.

"Was the person trying to be expressive? Form is one of the elements of art. To have art, you need to have form or line, or shape, color or texture, and that is what you look at. And that you also have this express interest of creating art. There is actually a purpose for it," she pointed out.

"When I look at these, I would have to think that the intent isn't art. I have a major bias to something like this anyway, clearly -- unfortunately -- because it looks, well, you know; I mean there are artists that mimic cartoons. I want to feel something; I want to have a reaction to it.

"I would never think that someone created these with the purpose of art if I saw them somewhere," she muses. "I would think they were toys."

With that expert opinion delivered, my daydreams of bringing my statue to an Antiques Roadshow event 20 years from now and hearing that they are worth buckets full of money are smashed. But then I realized that what these small statues really represent is the transfer of a piece of my online world into the real one.

The use of technology that mimics the magic of alchemy in which a pile of powder and colored inks are transformed into the image of a character that -- until now -- I could only visit with in games but who I can now hold in my hands may not be art, but it is still pretty cool.

As I researched this column I learned that, in addition to Xbox avatars, the company can use their special software to make statues of characters from other games, such as World of Warcraft, and the day will soon come when they can take a photograph and create a three-dimensional image from it. I have to admit that the idea of replacing my photo album with statues of my favorite people in the world gives this Generation X'er goosebumps!