SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Douglas Coupland can neither confirm nor deny he's ever 3D printed his butt.

Author Douglas Coupland gets a headshot with himself at the Racquet Club on Monday. - Jessica Davey-Quantick/NNSL photo

"It's kind of like asking you have a photocopier? What was the craziest thing you've ever photocopied," he said.

The Generation X author was at the Racquet Club on Monday making 3D portraits of Yellowknifers, part of 3D Canada, a crowd-sourced art project to scan around 2,000 Canadians and use their likenesses in a large-scale installation.

This particular project started in 2015, when fashion retailer Simons commissioned Coupland to create a sculpture for its Vancouver store.

But Coupland has been playing with printers well before that. In 1999, while working on another project, he discovered it was cheaper just to buy his own 3D printer. He's been using it ever since.

Initially, the project was going to document people at six Simons stores across Canada, but it grew, making stops in nine different cities - Quebec City, Montreal, Edmonton, Vancouver, Ottawa, Mississauga, Calgary, Halifax and Yellowknife.

"Basically, we had a map of Canada with pins," said Coupland, adding he hopes the project gives people a chance to see themselves differently.

"There's a metaphysical feeling that you get while the scanner is circling you and then suddenly you look over at the screen and ... it's 3D you," he said. "It's completely different than a head in a mirror. It goes to a totally different part of the brain."

The scanning process takes about 30 seconds, while the printing takes about 45 minutes per bust.

Coupland is on the hunt to capture as many sides of people as he can get without being creepy.

"There was a joke about a year ago that we want to make it look like a Trudeau cabinet," he said.

"We had all these images we had to put into folders, and what it boils down to is babies, toddlers, kids, teens, young people trying to look hot, moms and dads, old people. That's humanity."

Mindy Frost-Greene came in to get scanned with her husband, Jason. She said she was happy to see the North represented in the project.

"If you're going to do a Canadian wide thing, then you've got to go Canadian wide, and often people forget about us up here in the Northwest Territories," she said. "So it's really great that they came up here."

Bob Brooks also got scanned to commemorate a milestone - his 60th birthday.

"I said, 'Hey, this is my 60th likeness. Immortalized at 60,'" he told Yellowknifer.

The display at the Racquet Club included some famous faces that have been part of the project. And that's where things get weird.

"I handled Mike Myers," said Greene. "I cradled him gently in my hand."

Coupland says digital projects like his are walking a fine line between art and technology, "fumbling through the materiality of the media specificity," or just capturing a specific moment in plastic posterity.

"I mean the ultimate thing is that people are beautiful," he said.

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