Oh, Oh, Oh, It'sMagic!

(Maybe one of these days I will pause a moment before pounding away at the New Post window -- I aspire to it. You're worth the outlining and editing and thoughtful shaping of ideas. But right now if I hesitate on any front, the moment is lost. I hope you can understand.)

So where have I been these past couple of days? Silently suffering. Just kidding -- only a little. This part of the creative process, shaping the ideas to generate the forms that will eventually mold the clay (so to speak in some cases, but here literally) is *so* -- I'll head off the more dramatic descriptors at the pass -- challenging. Especially, as many of you have experienced, to be in this part of the process with nary a lick of fun in sight to balance out the challenge.

I can easily say, with the exception of getting utterly lost in the choices of the Saturday Market in the town square (23 produce stands alone not to mention the dairy, meat, textiles, electronics, clothing, and flower booths), and going for a run on the moor yesterday, I was either reading, slogging through Rhino lessons, attempting some elementary drawings in rhino, or totally stressing myself out that everything's kinda crap. You've been there. You know what I mean. The utter hopelessness that every so often arises at the nexus of perceived lack of time and too many ideas.

But then I revisited Brian Eno's essay 'Into the Abyss' and was reminded that it's all part of the cycle of things...and started to make some more satisfying drawings. I joined Second Life. That's right. I'm diving in -- not because I'm not satisfied with my first life -- for the project, which I know I haven't explained yet. In due time.



So today, it's evident that all the time in the isolation chamber was worth it, because as I tap, the CNC machine is Cutting The Foam.
I'm thrilled.
It's magic.
I made these drawings and output them to a certain file type, which got opened in another software and saved out as another kind of file And then we -- the staff member in charge of the CNC machine, Mark -- went downstairs and cut some foam to size. I'm back on big machinery for the first time since Mr. Meadows' class called Industrial Arts (what a classy name for wood shop) in sixth grade. The culmination of my studies back then were a cheeseboard (with a very elegant mallard duck burned into the center, freestyle, by yours truly) and a mail sorter, also following the mallard motif.
How times have changed.

The foam went into the machine bed, and the last file type was uploaded into it's brain. The whole set up -- fully DOS -- made me think of Matthew Broderick and Wargames. He was so nerdy and great, and now he's just creepy.

It's nearly time to go check the model, so I'll leave you with these photos of the process:

Step 1: the Rhino lessons. I think I made it from 1 to 17 before feeling fully frustrated. After 17, I skipped to 47 and learned how to draw the rubbery ducky.


2. Drawing something -- anything -- in Rhino freeform. Here's my 3rd hillside study.


This is Mark's office where all my files get fed into another program and compiled for the CNC machine. There's alot of foam up in there. And the table in the foreground is actually large-scale CNC milled styrofoam.There two tiny chairs that match it, too.


3. There's the machine! It's cutting!


4. Ally Sheedy (http://imdb.com/title/tt0086567/), eat your heart out. These are the coordinates of my sketches that tell the mill-head where to go. It's amazing that after all those vectors and commands, that at the end of the line it's a simple text file with coordinates that makes the machine work.