IRM

Charlotte Gainsbourg is pretty amazing in a lot of ways. Music is one of them. This is an album she wrote and produced with Beck called IRM:

heartland printworks

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Indianapolis is unabashedly conservative. So, growing up in Indianapolis meant spending a lot of time complaining and listening to people complain about the doldrums of growing up in Indianapolis. It was as if we all decided from a young age that this city was a lost cause and that anything worth doing needed to be done elsewhere. I believed that for a while. I moved away for college and travelled every chance I got, but on every trip back home the city would reveal some new and fantastic treasure to me. Most recently it was Heartland Printworks.

Heartland Printworks is home to the German made Cruse scanner--the largest scanner in the world today--and was the first in the United States to acquire one. It can scan objects both 2 and 3 dimensional up to 59x96 inches and file sizes can be as large as 1.1 gigabytes. Basically, it is one badass machine and though it was probably created with historical preservation in mind you could also have a lot of hi-res fun with it at an office Christmas party (if you can sit still for 7 minutes while it scans you).

So, lets say you have a painting you've painted and you want to create prints for affordable mass distribution. You can bring it in to these guys at Heartland and in a matter of minutes they can scan and print your work onto archival paper or canvas with such color and lighting accuracy that you literally cannot tell the difference between your life's work and giant print-out.

Hanging side by side, they are indistinguishable from one another until you run your hand across them. This is the printed image of the original painting. It is completely smooth. Once it's framed and under glass all the evidence of it's inauthenticity will be destroyed. This scanner is like something out of heist film--you really have to see it to appreciate the quality.

They can also scan 3D objects like these eerie antique doll heads they keep around the office and then print them 50 times their size without loosing any resolution.

This iPhone photo doesn't do the print justice, but the scanner even managed to pick up the little specks of dust resting on the doll's glass eyes.

The Heartland Printworks office is downtown in the Stutz building and it's a little pricey to enlist their services, but well worth it if you have the need. I'd really love to see a series of life-sized scanned people. Perhaps for my birthday I'll indulge in a little narcissism and go have myself scanned. I think existing a quarter of a century is an occasion worth celebrating with a full body scan of yourself, maybe I'll even make it an annual tradition and map the passage of time across my body until it becomes a glaringly unhealthy fixation. Sounds like a plan.

hat maker, hat maker, make me a hat

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When I enter that financial stage of my life which is accompanied by dressing maids and custom milliners I have decided that Albertus Swanepoel will be that milliner. I'm sure he's counting down the days.