atoms&electrons

When I finally get around to writing my self-help book, it will be entitled Everything I Needed To Know About Life, I Learned From The Apple ][. It was my first computer and to really get the most out of it you needed to understand how it worked at the lowest levels. It was the period of my life when I had no money and nearly infinite time, so spending weeks reverse-engineering games and copy protection schemes to understand how they worked was the norm. I learned persistence, dealing with constraints and a work ethic from those experiences. Like any formative experience, it left an indelible impression on me. If I’m ever called-upon to testify in a court of law, I’d like to be sworn in with one hand on The Red Book.

There’s a fine line between being a Maker and a Crafter (if indeed there really is any line at all). Personally I got into this hobby with the firm intention to stay on the side of the line that is occupied by computer-controlled lasers and Tesla coils, but lately have found myself spending an inordinate amount of time playing with construction paper. I feel like somehow I should be more enlightened and not care about such trivialities, but the fact remains that when one sets out to find their inner Edison it’s a bit of a shock to discover that really it’s Martha Stewart in there. I take some comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who struggles with this. Let’s face it, the only reason to crochet a hand grenade is to prevent your idle hands from turning out a tea cozy.

I was at a local toy store recently and saw a display of Etch A Sketch toys. They were marketed as “retro” toys – something you would buy to remind you of a bygone era and feel thankful for having the great fortune to live in a more sophisticated period of history. I had an Etch A Sketch when I was a kid and I can assure you that when I played with it I did so without any cool ironic detachment. For me, that thing was bad-ass.

Keep in mind, this was before video games. I realize they’re putting Nintendo NES systems on key chains and giving them away in cereal boxes these days, but even NES was way beyond the first video games that came after my Etch A Sketch days. Atari 2600, Fairchild Channel-F, even Pong had yet to appear. But Etch A Sketch did exist and it’s true full name is the Etch A Sketch Magic Screen. It’s easy to overlook, but it’s designed to look like a TV. TVs used to have knobs on them – one for channel and the other for volume – just like the Etch A Sketch. So basically it was a TV that I could control and put any image I could imagine onto.

I should probably start by saying I’m not an expert in Buddhist practices or those of just about any other religion. The sum total of my knowledge in this area was picked up from Chinese restaurants, re-runs of Kung Fu and the occasional PBS documentary. Somehow amidst the Honey Walnut Prawns and pledge drives I’ve become aware of an exercise practiced by Buddhist monks that I find fascinating.

Tibetan Sand Painting is an ancient art where monks creating beautiful and exquisitely detailed pieces of artwork with colored sand. It’s a labor-intensive process that can take days to complete, and the results are amazing. But when the art is completed they simply brush the sand away destroying the image. It’s a metaphor for the fleeting nature of life. That’s always seemed intriguing to me – creating something just to destroy it. Now I’m not sure if this next part is true or not, but I recall hearing that they destroy the artwork the instant it is completed. There’s no sitting around gazing upon their work in awe and high-fiving each other. The point of the creation is the destruction and nothing else. So the logical thing to do upon its completion is to immediately trash it. It’s religious meditation as punk rock. Maybe that’s why this idea is appealing to me.

One of my favorite toys at Techshop is the Epilog laser cutter. It can cut and etch at resolutions up to 1200dpi. It can cut through things like paper, cardboard, acrylic and thin wood as well as etching into those materials, metal and even food.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with creating pictures by cutting pieces out of colored card stock and stacking them up. The way to think about it is that each layer of paper gives you a single color – it’s like a 1-bit monochrome bitmap that’s either the color of the paper or transparent showing what’s behind it. Newspaper printers figured out ages ago how to deal with a similar set of constraints – a single ink color, but high resolution of ink placement – and approximate multiple shades of color using a technique called half-toning. Here’s how I adapted this technique for paper-cut images.