On Thursday I used the laser cutter for the first time, and it was like Christmas. I am playing around with a couple of different physical things that I want to make using this amazing tool, but to start I created a bunch of phone models in clear acrylic and a to-scale cuts of the apps.
I originally cut the clear acrylic scaled phone models with the intention of making a touch register that would have some sort of ‘touch’ indication on each screen (a fingerprint), but perhaps it is too obvious a link to the concept that I am exploring. After talking with Lee about painting as gesture and doing some research on art as ‘faith objects’ in my personal tutorial on Tuesday, I am thinking of exploring the gesture and the magnitude by which we touch our phones in other ways. Too, I am starting to think about exploring the notion of the relationship of touch for objects verses people. However, I am still going to play around and experiment with these acrylic models.
In addition to creating the touch register, I wanted to explore using texture as a means to make the zine physically interesting. This was the motivation for creating these to scale apps. I want to emboss them with paper and put them in our zine, so that there are pages that are interesting to navigate with your fingers because of the haptics of them. This takes the notion of touching an image for the sake of a visual change (opening an app etc) and makes it about touching an image created by difference in the 3-D space of the paper for the sake of experiencing those changes in the paper’s elevation.
However, in creating this ‘stencil’, I have created some wonderful objects. Even as soon as we pulled the objects out of the laser cutter, Annie remarked that they had a totally different character. After I finish the embossing, I want to play around with reconfiguring the pieces to make something new and strange.
RCA Graduate Diploma 