3D Printed Venetian Masks Look Like Fibrous Growths On A Human Face

The Carnival of Venice happens every year and involves people getting dressed up in those creepy masks and parading around the city in a tradition that stretches back to about the 12th century. Design lab Do The Mutation and decided to update the traditional costume used at the carnival using a Kinect and 3D printing, to create custom masks (which are also kinda creepy) to fit the contours of an individual's face in their project Collagene.

Unlike the classic styles of Venetian masks, the group wanted their masks to look like an organic biological extension of the body, in which they imagined the mask as the "product of the growth of a virtual organism on the human face." It's a project that merges the world of the digital with that of our physical selves in an intimate and personal way. The scan of the face is used to generate the fibrous mask using sketchbook software Processing, so it fits the face like a proverbial glove. Once scanned the masks were then built and 3D printed by CRP using their Windform LX2.0 material.

A model of a mask

"This project explores the border territory between physical and virtual", the group say "connecting computer code’s abstractions with the intimate, visceral dimension of body alteration’s sense brought by the mask theme." 

You can check out the process in the video above and check out some of the resulting masks, below.

Photos courtesy of Studio 129 and Stefano Paolini.