 The starting point of this was me talking with Manuel Franquilla, who was a 23-year-old then member of the team, and saying, Manuel, could you, could we, use the emerging photogrammetry to really build a system that could capture faces with the kind of resolution I need to answer the demands of the aesthetic surgeons that I was talking to at the time. When I set up Factor, I set it up with Manuel Franquilla Sr., so with Manuel's father, and Manuel came up with this concept idea very fast. But actually the concept idea is very similar to the one that Willem designed in the 1850s. So he had lots of cameras positioned around a head, and we have a moving arm moving around a head. So you sit in there, it's about a four second process. How many images are being taken? 96. Each camera takes 12 images as it flashes around. What we've basically got here is something dependent on absolutely uniform light. And the flash units, a 3D printed infactum, are designed by the same team that built it. All of the software that's automatically processing the data was written in-house. And really I think the unique thing that happens in Madrid is that we have a team of people who go from idea to realisation, all in-house. And the big challenge is how you get a software engineer to talk to an artist, to talk to a conservator, to talk to someone who's a gilder, to talk to people with different skills. And professional disciplines tend to fragment and break down communication. So to me what happened in the Renaissance was you had a similar thing. We're in a workshop. There's the people who are grinding the paint, who are making the colour, who are grounding the gesso, who are doing the drawing, who are playing it. But they're all working together for a common goal. It is true that 3D printing, or 3D remaking, began at the beginning of the 20th century. But it wasn't possible like these machines now that are all the desktop machines of the future. There are many hands and many artists from the design of the system to the writing of the software to all of the stages of actually processing and transforming that data, because nothing happens on its own. And so the only difference here is rather than the image of Charlton Heston like Michelangelo chipping away at a block to release the spirit that inhabits the block, you have a seven-axis arm that does exactly the moves of a human arm that is being sent clear and stretched. This is what's known as subtractive manufacturing. So you're actually removing material from the block and all of these are additive, so they're building it up. And that's exactly the dynamic that's very traditional on one hand. But this is done by a machine that's cutting and those are done by machines that fuse or harden or sinter different materials. So there's a whole host of new systems coming up for rematerialising 3D data that to me has the feel of the excitement that went with photography in the 19th century. So if photography was one of a host of processes that was enabling us to print the world around us, then it was dominantly two-dimensions but not in time. It is interesting to think where this technology may go with artists. I mean, we can't really say one of the things about artists is that they think it's slightly different on the lateral ways. But it does feel that we're at the beginning of something of immense potential with this technology as well as the technologies we've talked about that will preserve the past in exciting ways. There is a creative possibility here in the right hand, isn't there? But it'll need to be a technology of manipulation, won't it? Because that's one of the things which is fascinating about these and about the busts, which are the end result because they're without mediation in a very real sense, aren't they? And that's so completely contrary to the traditional ideas of portraiture. And I think of the 18th century portraits at Wadston, for example, where you might have a portrait of an 18th century actress, but she's depicted as a character from classical mythology. She's dressed in clothes that kind of equate to some idea of a classical past, all seen through the eyes of an artist and his workshop. And there are so many layers there. And there are layers here, but they're different layers. So this is Tatiana who was scanned. You've got every pore on the surface of the skin, every blemish. You've got the whole face absolutely there. But if I lift her off, you could also see where the scanner couldn't resolve the back of her head. You can see where strange triangulated forms are appearing. And if you look at many contemporary artists now, this language, the language of triangulation, of low-resolution three-dimensional data, is one you can find in every art fair around the world. Because we were trying to resolve problems with the hair, we decided to put this data into ZBrush, which is a 3D modeling software, and model the hair based on the multiple photographs that we use to extract the three-dimensional data from. So here this is Tatiana's hair and hairstyle, slightly stylized. But if you look very carefully, what happens is we've now lost all of the specificity of the skin and the surface that makes this have its qualities. So to me, I think the subject of every sculptor is someone who's manipulating and playing with the qualities of different things. And I find in the juxtaposition here, or in this paper-laired sculpture, which is put here because it's a more traditional method of making a three-dimensional form. So this is pre-20th century. Right, now you can do it faster by digitally cutting it. But there's something incredibly exciting in the little language that's going on between these forms. So this is Nancy Durant routed in wood. What you see here is not the surface of Nancy Durant's skin. You see the shape of Nancy Durant's face, but not the surface of her skin because the surface is showing you either the grain of the wood or much more dominantly the toolpath of the milling machine. So I think a big question is, are you looking for a notion of sculpture that exists here or are you looking for pores that exist there? And I think this is something even from a life cast that you won't get better data than that because the alginate or the plaster is actually slightly deforming the fatty tissue on the face. Objects, valuable objects, art objects, can be preserved as they are at a particular moment in time. And it's a phenomenally important document, isn't it? Yes, it is. And again, it's got us a wonderful historical track record. You think of the cast courts at the V&A, for example, doing exactly the same thing. And now we treasure those objects, which for many years, even just in the last century, were sort of not exactly reviled but certainly weren't respected because they were copies. And yet how important are they now for our understanding of that past? So I think it's incredibly important. It has so many different potential applications, through sculpture, through textiles, through anything actually that decays over time. It really is like a performance where it's high risk, it's high adrenaline, things can go wrong. The team is still in the corner trying to resolve one or two issues. And what we want to see is when this goes to Woodstone in two months' time, some of the issues will have been worked out, some new possibilities will have emerged. But we'll be giving a larger section of the public an opportunity to be recorded and to really enjoy the potential and feel the curiosity that's stimulated by this mix of art and technology and science altogether and all without the normal professional barriers that keep them apart.