Harshbarger: LEGO Calista

Harshbarger: LEGO Calista (eye detail)

Eric Harshbarger is serious. About LEGO. He does “Professional LEGO Sculpting and Mosaic Building”, with some serious building credits to his name. He also has an obvious obsessive streak, most likely a prerequisite for any dedicated LEGO builder.

Harshbarger’s LEGO mosaic of Calista Flockhart uses a quarter million LEGO bricks of the diminutive Modulex variety with letters. Using time-honored ASCII graphic techniques, he was able to turn his multiple bags of bricks into a physical ASCII mosaic, using different letters to create shades of gray. Modulex turns out to be a LEGO curiosity, as Harshbarger explains:

One has to admire the sheer tenacity of anyone willing to assemble an ASCII mosaic out of bricks so small they can barely be handled without special tools. But ultimately the question should be asked: Why Calista Flockhart? Why a photograph? The representational approach seems a waste of (a lot of) good bricks.

An alternative proposal would be to reconstruct Boris Müller’s Fast Faust poster. The poster present all the words of Goethe’s Faust, shown in order of frequency. Spelled out in Modulex, that would be quite something. If you have any Modulex bricks lying around, please send them to the Generator.x headquarters in anticipation of this project.

Other LEGO mentions: A Turing Machine made from Lego, LEGO Digital Designer.