Marcel Duchamp's chess set from 1918

In 1918 Artist, sculptor and chess enthusiast Marcel Duchamp designed and hand-carved a chess set in Buenos Aires. Marcel Duchamp has created two chess sets in his life: his 1943 Pocket Chess Set was released as a limited edition, but his 1918 set, is owned by a private collector and since then, unseen by the public.

But now, thanks to 3D printing, artists and makers Scott Kildall and Bryan Cera, teamed up to recreate the tabletop chess set using an archival photograph of Marcel Duchamp's own custom and hand-carved game. By running a series of geometry-extrapolating algorithms on the photograph, Cera were able to get an accurate model of the knight, the hardest to model. Cera then sent the finished 3D CAD files over to Kildall who printed out the first set of prototypes using an Objet 3D printers.