An image taken from the Nefertiti Hack 3-D scan, whose provenance is now more mysterious than ever. (credit: Nefertiti Hack)
Last month, two artists grabbed headlines across the world by announcing that they had snuck a hacked Kinect Sensor into the Neues Museum in Berlin and done a guerrilla 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a precious artwork from ancient Egypt. Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles called their work The Other Nefertiti and released their data file to world. Now anyone can have an incredibly high-quality reproduction of the sculpture, or remix it to make new artworks. But immediately, experts raised questions about the scan—it was just too high quality for a Kinect. Al-Badri and Nelles inflamed speculation when they refused to share more details about their scanning techniques.
A 4K render of the Nefertiti Hack data.
The bust of Nefertiti has long been a bone of contention in the art world. Arguably, it belongs in Egypt, but German archaeologists took it from Amarna, Egypt over a century ago and have never given it back. Nefertiti holds a special place in ancient Egyptian history. In the 1350s BCE, her husband Pharaoh Akhenaten moved the royal palace from Thebes to the newly built city of Akhetaten (now Amarna). Together, Nefertiti and Akhenaten radically changed the structure of the state religion--some call it an early version of monotheism—and ushered in an era of unusually realistic art.
Al-Badri and Nelles displayed a 3D printed reproduction of Nefertiti's bust in Cairo as part of their project, suggesting that only a high-tech heist allowed them bring this part of Egyptian history back to its rightful place. Their message, and the intriguing story of a covert museum scan, captured the public's imagination.
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