This week’s selection is the astonishingly huge “Monument for the 308” sculpture by Andreas Greiner.
This is a massive 3D print of what appears to be a dinosaur, something like you’d seen in many notable museums. But it’s not a dinosaur; it’s actually a chicken, some twenty times life size!
Greiner explained the unusual name for this piece as inspired by a type of chicken.
What? There are types of chickens? Yes indeed! Over the past decades the agriculture industry has bred a number of specialized livestock species for different agricultural purposes.
One of them is the “Ross 308” “product”. What is a “Ross 308”? As explained here:
The Ross 308 satisfies the demands of customers who require a bird that performs consistently well and has the versatility to meet a broad range of end product requirements. The Ross 308 breeder produces a high number of eggs combined with good hatchability to optimize chick cost in situations where broiler performance is important.
The Ross 308 is recognized globally as a broiler that will give consistent performance in the broiler house. Integrated and independent producers value the growth rate, feed efficiency and robust performance of the Ross 308.
Here’s a Ross 308:
Greiner decided to make a monument to this particular bird, and when he realized that chickens are actually descended from dinosaurs, this design became real. In fact, as far as I know, a chicken IS a dinosaur. We just don’t call them that.
The eight-meter tall sculpture is composed of a large number of parts, whose designs were obtained by 3D scanning a set of chicken bones (from a 308, obviously).
The printing took place on a BigRep 3D printer, and the PLA parts were then painstakingly assembled using metal armature to hold them in place where the sculpture sits today, at the Berlinerische Galerie in Berlin.
While each of the parts are quite large and suitable for printing on a large format 3D printer such as BigRep’s, the entire sculpture is truly gigantic. It may be the largest plastic 3D print in the world.
Via YouTube
