Microetchings

At the end, the medium of all visual art is light.  Whether it is a sculpture or a painting, we only infer the work's beauty by the light that it scatters into our eyes.  In a partnership with Dr. Greg A Dunn, we have created a new medium that directly controls the scattering of light.  We call these Microetchings.

The concept is relatively simple.  We have all seen how light catches the ridges in a vinyl record.  It is apparent that light is being reflected off of the scratched surface in a controlled way.  We employ a similar concept.  We place several bright lights around the piece and then use our knowledge of optics to calculate how microscopic scratches should be oriented across the surface of the piece to create the image we want to see from a particular vantage point.  This gives us an extra dimension that we can use for whatever we want.

In some cases, you put all of the ridges in the same direction to pick up the light from a single colored bulb.  Or, we can use several ridge directions to pick up light from several light sources of different colors.  Or, we can subtly vary the ridge directions to create animations as either the viewer or the observer moves.

In practice, we create the all of the ridges through a lithographic process described in detail here.  The mathematics that goes into calculating the ridges is described here.

Highlighted pieces are Self Reflected, Conscious Philadelphia