My first home, which I shared with
my twin brother David, was
our mother’s womb. This is the
first sentence of the book that’s
got me thinking about what
exactly memory does
and what time it does that in,
for example, when was I
‘I’ when I wrote that sentence,
was I in the time of the
tardy twin hanging back in
the warm, shady womb, or was
I out here in the cold light
of day, too late now to say
wait as Dave’s shadow stands up
and moves into the neither
here nor there we live in while
everything remarkable
in the world packs the foreground’s
augmented reality
that never lasts long enough.

How did we do it?

The front face of the watch was the easiest to machine as the cover was made of plastic which machined well into the UV laser system. We managed to get the machine the poem right above the hands of the watch which gives an idea of just how small it is at 1.3 mm across. One of the interesting things that happened with the text is that the first few lines became skewed. This is due to the thousands on line which we had to use for the words. The software optimises the shortest path to write all of the lines. However with too many lines the program could not handle the optimisation and gave a very interesting design where the letters almost look as if they are coming apart.

Augmented reality
was what Donna talked about
on the way to lunch in the
food-court on Ponsonby Road
but I forgot all about
it when she next told me that
the mummified body of
an Egyptian princess had
been diagnosed with a heart
condition at forty years
of age despite a presumed
diet of vegetables,
fruit, and fish, pretty much what
we eat most of the time and
believe we’re doing enough
thereby to earn a decent
stretch. Memory, though, what a
shadowy mystery that
is, how it mars the surface
of the present it then stands
up in, augmented, a dead
presence that should have lasted.

How did we do it?

Machining onto the die was quite challenging as we couldn’t fit it under our laser beam. We ended up taking the stage off and gluing it to the moving carriage. We used femtosecond laser machining with no mask but an attenuated beam. The whole poem is 1.2 mm across.

Please don’t squeeze me until I’m
yours reads the greengrocer’s sign
on his ripe avocados
whose enticing location
in a tilted tray on the
footpath outside his shop says,
we live in a country of
ripe words, which is why the im-
print of memory may be
all that mars the surfaces
where the outlines of trees can
seem to rise up at any
time and become the shadows
of runners circling the park
a green Link bus goes past with
me in it, thinking, ‘How can
I know what memory is
going to offer me unless
I can feel it’s ready to?’

How did we do it?

We found that there was an anti reflective coating on one side of the lens we were able to then machine text onto this plastic coating using the UV nanosecond pulsed laser. The students that chose this design wanted the text to be in a spiral. The computer graphics for this design took the longest out of any of them. What was need was a single line font that could be spun into a spiral we tried different packages but couldn’t map the text onto a spiral finally using three different programs and a mathematical formula we were able to wrap the text into the spiral you see at only 0.8 mm across.

SEM image of the machined coal

Shadow stands up under the
trees in Victoria Park
whose own filigree shadows lie
across matted russet leaves
on the sodden green turf that
the morning’s tai chi moves
barely mar – I see this from
the Link bus window as we
cross the intersection at
the bottom of the hill where
Kathmandu’s winter sale fails
to persuade me there’s much to
gain from any promise of
warmth other than what I get
when, while rain rattles against
the bedroom window at dawn,
I press my ear to the smooth
skin between Donna’s shoulder-
blades and hear, in the hollow
chamber where she’s making dream
words, a voice that’s not the
same as hers say eerily,
‘Shadow stands up.’ It’s morning.

How did we do it?

One of the difficulties in machining on coal was not being able see through the camera on the machining stage so we weren’t sure whether we had actually machined the coal until we put it under the electron microscope. Another problem was the large cracks in the coal so we had to make the text larger than the other poems so that we could see the text over the microscopic landscape of the coals surface. We used the femtosecond laser in direct write to scribe the text into the coal. The text is ~3 mm across.

Hi Everyone,

Posts that we need for the website are

• About the Author
• Object posts
  • Verse 1 – Coal
  • Verse 2 – Lens
  • Verse 3 – Die
  • Verse 4 – Watch
  • Verse 5 – Cardboard
  • Verse 6 – Faceted block
  • Verse 7 – Bus card
  • Verse 8 – Cork
  • Verse 9 – Key
  • Verse 10 – Paua
• About the team – Photon Factory Students involved etc.
• Bloopers

So log in and start writing. We want to have all the content on the website in a month.

Cheers,

Jake