Watch Historic Coney Island Recreated Using a 3D Printer
"More remains of ancient Rome than of turn-of-the-century Coney Island," says Brooklyn artist Fred Kahl, explaining why he chose to create a detailed scale model of an amusement park from 100 years ago. "This is  about a deep love of Coney Island as the cultural melting pot and showcase for presenting cutting-edge technology as entertainment.", The result of his passion is the world's largest-ever 3-D printed art installation. It fills an entire gallery at the Coney Island Museum, which reopens Memorial Day Weekend after being shuttered since October 2012 to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy. , Kahl began working with 3-D printing a few years ago. He created his own open-source hardware for making full-body scans using an Xbox Kinect game controller to capture 3-D images of his subjects. He raised over 16,000 via Kickstarter to get the Coney Island project started in 2013 a year later, he has assembled hundreds of 3-D prints and produced over an estimated 10,000 hours of print time for the installation dubbed, "Thompson  Dundy's Luna Park 3-D Printed by the Great Fredini.", The video above was produced by filmmaker Ronni Thomas, creator of The Midnight Archive web-video series. He says he was drawn to make "Printing History," as a fellow artist and borough-mate of Kahl's "As a born and raised Brooklynite," Thomas says, "Coney Island has long been a beacon for the peculiar and the other-wordly obsessions i've held since my very first childhood memories."