Manda Sue

Fab is the production of a personal need through the development of a machine. Kahn’s article is about how light develops everything that is occupied by space, “I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent light�. These two have a relationship of the creation of an object, and two different perspectives of it.

The Fab explanation is relative to the Digital or physical realm. It is the creation of an object though the signals and information represented in a physical value.

The Light explanation is relative to the Virtual or Mental realm. It’s given the appearance of something through the physical existence of an object and light.

Together they make a representation of a way to create man’s needs. Together they also enter the Realm of Information-Communication. Using each technique and information they can collaborate to move from the ideas of something into bigger grasps or ideas of something that comes from the original.

I speculate that both are correct. Light creates images. Light creates dimensions, depth, and physical reality to the eye and perspective to a person. It is descriptive and informational. It is the key to understanding something. Like the word, ‘en-light-en-ment’. Root word light: the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible. The personal fabrication devices are used to create physical objects. They are machines that can create anything the mind might visualize. The key point to light is that, if you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Your Fab machine can create something and if you turn off the light and physically describe it without seeing it, you could describe the shape and smell, taste, flexibility, material, size, almost anything except for color, by relating the object to other familiar objects in your mind. You know how big a toaster is, and if you have an object that you cant fit your arms around, you would know how big it is because of the relative comparison to known objects. Being able to physically see something, through the description of light, is a different way of communicating to your mind of an object.

For instance I could describe an object to you, and without even seeing it, you could imagine it in your mind. So pretend your are sitting in a chair in a room with the lights off. I hand you an object. By feeling it you can tell it is: round, about 3 feet in diameter, it has a texture of flexible rubber, with little lined ridges on it. When you press it, it indents a little. It is hollow inside. You can tell that it is extremely light. You toss it into the air lightly. It lightly comes back down. You can smell it. It has a rubbery thick smell. You drop it. It bounces back. What do you think it is?
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What color did you imagine it to be? Without seeing it, there was still an object. If I was to set the ball 4 feet away and without you even touching or smelling or hearing it, with three seconds of the light on you would be able to tell me everything that I described to you with an addition of the color. Light creates the image in a different way. In a mental way. Where everything but light creates the image in a physical way. Light is described to be all the colors in one. We use light as measurement. The speed of light. The color of the paint is to light, or dark. We can determine what race you are by light and the effects of your pigmentation of your skin. Even what flavor your toothpaste is.

So to a point, I think they are right. Well they are right, but there are other factors. Kahn talks about light as if it is the only aspect but I just showed you how you can sill have everything but color without light. Of course if light never existed then how would you have built the perfect building or even rendered the images for it, for you wouldn’t be able to see how it was going to look. How would someone have designed that exercise ball if at some point in time they never couldn’t see it? So I believe that light is the start of things, objects, relationships, and connections. But from that we build other descriptions to declare other relationships and connections. Like you would be able to describe the difference from one object to the next because of those connections. The Fab does the same thing but it uses technology. It describes something to create an object but it uses the machine to do it. So a machine can describe the texture, size and even color to create it. That to me is takeing the object to the next level. When the human doens't even have the interaction to describe the object.