Tools of the trade

Never Done: I saw a laser cutter

So cool! Picture a giant photocopy machine, only imagine that instead of having a paper feed, you have a bed made of a sheet of metal honey comb -- about a foot below the glass plate where you place your original image. And then imagine that instead of that bar of light that moves across the plate with some sensors that somehow sense your image and translate it into information for the printer, that you have tons of vectors figuring it out so a laser can cut through something in 3D. That's what a laser cutter is like. I know I just did a laughable job of describing it, and that reminds me of a game a friend recently told me about, in which she asks her artsy, non-scientific friends to explain scientific things, and then she videotapes them. Like, how do satellites work? And how about photosynthesis? And then these people with a basic artist's working knowledge of science and technology try to explain How Stuff Works. (I have asked her for a link to these videos, but didn't ask soon enough to link to it here, but when I get it, I'll go back and link for you.)

Anyhow, Josh's mom was an amazing paper cut artist, and had a lot of her work reproduced by laser, so in the past number of years I've been around a lot of laser cut artwork. I think if I had run into a laser cutter a couple years ago, before falling in love with Tsip's artwork and then starting to notice what in the world is laser cut, it wouldn't have been such a big deal to me, but given that I have, and given that the props for the video I am producing are being laser cut, I loved getting to see the tool of the trade.