Turn Your Facebook Profile Into a 3D Printable Sculpture

In the age of “Big Data,” data visualizations are all over the place, giving us insight into the election, the economy, pop culture, and even ourselves. At The Creators Project, we wanted to use data in a different, more creative, and slightly more playful way. We asked three artists to re-imagine our Facebook profiles as a unique artistic experience and partnered with 3D printing service Shapeways to bring these works of art to life as 3D printed sculptures.

Try all three experiences for yourself here: create.thecreatorsproject.com (Works best in Google Chrome.)

The artists we chose—art and technology studio Sosolimited, design and animation studio Sticky Monster Lab, and architecture and design studio SOFTlab—all come from different parts of the world and different creative disciplines, which resulted in three wildly different interpretations of our online identities. Each experience yields a 3D printable sculpture that you can bring to life with some 3D printing magic from Shapeways.

Astroverb by Sosolimited

In the past, the wordsmith data maestros at Sosolimited have given us such text-driven interactive experiences as ReConstitution 2012, a live deconstruction of last year’s presidential debates. This time, they developed their own tongue-in-cheek astrological system called “Morpholuminology” and set their algorithms to work on the text in your Facebook profile—analyzing your status updates and posts to create an absurdist horoscope (called a “Lexoscope”) and a unique zodiac symbol (called a “Morphogram”), which you can 3D print and wear as a good luck charm. The app tracks and deconstructs your language, assessing it according to six key personality dimensions like “Extrovert,” “Blasphemer,” “Utopian,” and others. Your personal ranking across each of the six dimensions determines your unique Lexoscope and Morphogram.

Monster Me by Sticky Monster Lab

Korean-based design studio Sticky Monster Lab are known for their painfully cute yet sinister characters and animated films, such as Lonely, as well as a recently launched line of collectable vinyl toys. For their Monster Me experience, they used information from your Facebook profile to generate a custom monster in their signature style. The monster’s shape is determined by your birthday, his environment is determined by your geographical location, and he’ll have some miniature friends to keep him company—the fewer friends you have on Facebook, the more virtual friends your monster will have to keep him from getting lonely. When you first meet your monster, he’ll be a newborn—just an itty bitty thing. You can grow him to full size by exploring the app, customizing the monster’s world by adding buildings to represent your interests and likes, snapping some pics of him, and eventually 3D printing him.

Crystallized by SOFTlab

SOFTlab is a studio that has its roots in architecture, which is apparent in their structured design aesthetic, which is often modular and uses parametric design, a code-based process, to come up with unusual shapes and forms. In Crystallized, SOFTlab have created a geode rock crystal that’s made up of your social relationships. Each point on the geode represents a friend and its shape is determined by the strength of your relationship. The more friends you add, the more interesting the form will be. When you first launch the app, you’ll see a geode made up of the people whose social graphs are most similar to yours. Crack it open to explore your friends’ interests and likes and customize the colors before snapping a photo to share with friends or 3D printing the sculpture on Shapeways.

Try all three experiences for yourself here: create.thecreatorsproject.com. Send us your generated link from your profile—the first five to send in a link in the comments will received a free 3D print from The Creator's Project.