About us

Who we are

Matou

Is a Maker on YouTube and has become fascinated by 3D-printing and building things.
Likes cats.

Gerhard

Is currently still pursuing his PhD in a relatively unrelated field of computer science, and is fond of generative art.
Also likes cats.

How did this project come to be?

Until recently, we worked together at Ulm University, where we also initially met and spent a few years of our lives pursuing PhDs. In early 2020, all over Ulm lots of posters sprung up, advertising a new "South-German 3D-printing Challenge".

One day, we met in our institute's kitchen to make tea, and started talking about the advertised 3D-printing challenge. Since Matou had recently gotten himself his first 3D-printer, he was, of course, intrigued, but was missing an idea for a project that he could enter the challenge with. As it so happens, Gerhard had carried around an idea which would lend itself nicely to 3D-printing, but never actually had the motivation or means to execute it.

The idea was to use personal digital memories (e.g., photos, videos, audio recordings, ...) to generate individualized, unique art pieces that could be 3D-printed. People or companies could take this art and put it into their homes, or offices, or cars or anywhere else, so it would remind them of the original memories that spawned the art pieces.
Once we realized that we now had (i) a viable idea, (ii) all required hardware and (iii) motivation, we decided to just go for it, and entered the challenge.

Several months, many cups of tea and lots of filament later, we emerged as the (completely flummoxed) winners of the first "South-german 3D-printing Challenge", back then still under the name "BitArt". Since we (unexpectedly, one might add) received lots of very positive feedback to our idea, it was clear that we could not just stop there. We continued developing our first prototype algorithms and finally brought this website to life, to share our idea of generative, personalized, physical art with you.