This is "old Internet" style fun territory (along the same lines as the Tom7 fun, if not quite as deep). I felt that the olive oil + fingerprint + phone screen was a really nice way to illustrate the core concept. Especially clever because it used something common and annoying to help describe how the plotter does its thing.
Before getting further into the article I thought maybe he was going to show how to use the plotter to control the oil smearing technique, which honestly would have been kind of cool.
He uses the third dimension to encode time, so that you get an image of the brain that illustrates how signals propagate dynamically between brain regions.
I have a version of this on my wall and its mesmerizing to look at with the right lighting conditions
Done, enjoy! I posted links to his web site instead of Sotheby’s. Even though his web site is a little broken, it had much more detail on the technical process, which I think HN will appreciate.
He did it on plastic CD cases, not oil. The oil in the beginning of the article was just for explaining the refraction that happens with the ridges in the structure.
It would be interesting to augment the plotter with a Unimorph piezoelectric disk scanner [1], to enable finer movement so lines can be drawn closer together.
interesting! the axidraw v3 that I used for this (https://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846) has a 0.0125mm stepper resolution, which means that it is pretty close to not-worth-it to go any finer since the sizes of the scratches are already many microns wide. But certainly with better etching technology that would be a super cool update!
Alexander's results show a movement range of 1.25um, 10 times smaller than the 12.5um step of your system, so in its current form it wouldn't be suitable for interpolating motor steps.
Also potentially interesting is Alexander's "cut-and-pull" technique for making scanning tips with a single atom at the point. I can't find the original reference, but here's a description:
The single atom would likely immediately wear down if used for scribing, but even if it wore down to multiple atoms wide it might still produce a very narrow line? I wonder what the effects of using an STM on a photosensitive plate would be, whether the strong electric field at the tip would lead to very narrow photographic lines?
Holography is such a beautiful and fascinating gateway to physics, and it’s so rare to see true demonstrations of it. Sadly, most people have no idea what it is because of how carelessly the term is thrown around, just like in this article. At least the author admits it and provides some kind of excuse, even if it’s at the end.
William Beaty had a video of the hands on the car hood. They showed up very detailed some 20 cm under the hood as if people captured inside. Quite the find.
