I was introduced to the art form of Découpage. It’s simply one where cuts are made in paper or other mediums to represent a scene. A niche of this art form is the “Poya” representing alpine life, often depicting transhumance. I had this on my radar for a while as I figured it would make for some good plotting material and it does that to a decent extent.
The more interesting part however, is the artform’s unique property of always having material connected. Which means it’s perfect for laser cutting, and for playing with shadows.
In its rightful place
I unfortunately didn’t take good pictures of my trials, I attempted to fill the gaps in epoxy which was a disaster. There is definitely more to explore, and I will further delve into it in due time.
This is the culmination of my collaboration with Lara Laubert. It turns out that Majestic Cat was only a preliminary test for this piece.
Each of Lara’s pen stroke was processed to be outlined and hatched so they would have enough visual weight on such a large scale. The basic “traveling salesman” algorithm I implemented doesn’t discriminate between outlines and hatches, so parts of the drawing look nonsensical until they all come together at the end.
I occasionally would stay near to machine to watch people’s reaction and had a few chats with them too. It’s a real pleasure to see how well received it was. When I took it down 3 students were curious about what I was going to do with the drawing so I offered it to them. It completely made their day and I couldn’t think of a better thing to happen for this drawing.
As always there were several trials and refinements before the public render.
I’ll do my best not to rant here, I got a new car, of course it’s connected, of course it defaults to sharing your location and everything else with Ford and its dumb affiliates, of course I diligently went through all the settings off the lot to disable all the data sharing, of course these settings found themselves back to enabled magically after a few days. And now Ford knows where I live, work, shop, eat, and everything in between. ~16 years ago society still cared about privacy, but multiple “scandals” quickly showed corporations there were no real repercussions legally or reputationally for privacy abuses. Since then it’s been a free for all, and a new generation of people has assimilated these practices as a norm. Let’s beat the piñatas for all they’ve got!
I’ve been trying to disable the cell modem in this car. Even if the car had a no-tricks UI for privacy settings (it doesn’t), I don’t trust software to truly report nothing back to the mothership. And so for definitive results, I want to pull the plug. Today I can, tomorrow, I’m sure cars will absolutely require a fresh slice of your private life before they deign take you anywhere.
Take a look at your car’s manual to find the fuse box and a mapping of what they control. In my case the box is by the passenger side’s right foot. It’s work to move the panels it’s behind out of the way. The manual points to a likely candidate:
Yup, sounds like the sort of shit I want to nuke
So I removed it and hoped for the best.
Next thing you know, gone is all the worthless bullshit Ford reimplemented worse than Apple so they too could suck up your data.
It brings me pleasure to see incapacitated corporate malpractice, but I know things will only get harder with time. At least I got me a 10 year respite.
