That Was The Week That Was — 14th June 2026

It's good to revisit things to find hidden treasures
— Laurie Anderson

This sentence from Laurie Anderson, said whilst taking part in In Between Days really stuck with me. I've often said look again at the scraps on the cutting room floor which has the same sentiment — how we can sometimes be too quick to disregard things because we think they are mistakes or errors.

And so this week I found myself revisiting Descendants my imagined digital robot collection from 2024 — a sold-out edition of 256 robots, all inspired by my own physical collection of vintage Japanese robots.

With the original collection, owners could purchase a physical print via a token-gated page on Produced for Use. People loved getting these analog prints to go alongside their digital version. So that go me thinking about making the robots actually physical by exploring turning the flat 2D images into 3D models which I could then 3D print.

A few years ago I tried various services which claimed it could create 3D models from 2D images but the results were always disappointing. Well it seems things have moved on and I was impressed with the outputs using meshy.ai. Water tight, printable models were now possible.

Firing up my Makerbot I printed a 10cm high test robot and it looked great. So now that's given me an idea for a new collection, which allows people to buy a physical version, which I'm going to explore more using a resin printer rather than a PLA based printer like my Makerbot, to get much more detail. There's certainly more treasure to be discovered here...