WT: Bionicle

Assemblage of the sliced scaled up LEGO 3D-printed lego part.

After the conversations I had this week with my tutors, we've concluded that it would be helpful to set a certain frame for my project to help me further explore without falling into a pit.

Next to watching the trilogy, I have also been reading more into the Bionicle lore. And it turns out that Toa, can be interpreted to be anywhere from 1.6m to 2.2m tall.

Based on this information, I've decided that one of the constraints or rules that I would like to work with will be that my scale of working should follow that of lore accurate Bionicle. That gives us a scaling factor of 12x for individual LEGO pieces if we use the upper end..

The print from yesterday actually already falls within that scale, just more in the middle region. I will probably have to run my printer 24/7 the coming period if I want to commit to these sizes.

Luckily I placed a large order of filament together with my classmates about a week prior, so that will be of good use.

Below you will find an screenshot of one part, scaled 12 times, sliced up into pieces to fit on my printer's print bed. The first part (the one with the highlighted print bed) should be done printing somewhere this evening and has a total printing time of ~9h.

Yesterday evening, before going to bed, I put on a 5 hour print (~25 cm in size) from one of the photogrammetry parts.

Over the coming week I want to turn this print into a real-life mirror of the texture baked .obj file of the Toa Hordika foot (50919), as if it were directly taken out of a computer monitor.

What is worth noting about this technique of rebuilding the part, is that the fabric of the object gets reshaped into a new identity. It starts to take a mutated form, while still holding information of its old self, all the while being suggestive of something more alien.

One of the things I have been wanting to do, but did not yet really try out is to play around with scale. The figures below show a first attempt of scaling up a LEGO Bionicle part from its original size all the way up to 5x its size.

Photogrammetry

After late last year, with helping my parents clearing out the attic, I stumbled upon two boxes full of old toys; LEGO Bionicle to be exact.

Having found my long lost favorite child hood toy I want to delve further into what Bionicle can bring me in my art practice. I was curious to see if other people have the same nostalgic feeling connected to this brand. And to my surprise they actually do, in numerous different ways.

One of them is the practice of collecting them again through online marketplaces. This is where I did my first sketch. I build a small Python library that scrapes eBay sold listings for price data on specific Bionicle sets. I kept it fairly brief so this is in no way a complete tool, but it does open a door in a more clear picture that gives a bit of insight in what these collectibles made from ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) are worth to people in the sense of valuta.