3D printing. Fabbing. Lockpicking.

Jonas has graciously spent time with us in Gothenburg and just got back to Stockholm, the town north of here. I’ve signed up for a few more dives and am looking forward to that. SKUP PALET, the art organisation that a bunch of us have started, is slowly getting its shit together and it looks like we’re going to represent at an art fair in Copenhagen. I visited Arcam today, the Gotheburg company that produces stuff in titanium that I wrote about in the post on rapid prototyping, and had a chat and a tour of their facilities; I got some insight into how specialised their buisiness model is, with only 50 machines worldwide.

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As research before my MFA lockpicking presentation I interviewed Marc Weber Tobias. He had forwarded his Skype account to his cellphone and talked to me as he stopped for gas somewhere in a desert. The world felt just as small and awesome as when I was in high school and interviewed NASA for the radio show we were doing. (The feeling being “I can call anyone and ask anything!”) There’s an article on him and his doings over at Wired, which you might enjoy.

→ Wired, Charles Græber: The ultimate lock picker exposes weak military installations, corporate systems

What comes through in the article – beside his drive and intelligence – is the lack of patience with stupidity and a genuine fascination with stuff. It’s a quality that many nerds and other obsessive people share, and I sympathise with it. It’s this fascination that I was trying to gleam at my meeting with Patrik Ohldin at Arcam.

Of course, coming from a sci-fi reading background and with my head full of ideas on the end of stuff that rapid prototyping is hearalding, I felt much as the city kid staring in awe and disbelief at someone milking a cow. Patrik had a much more buisiness minded approach to the technology; He keeps abreast of what is happening in their sector, but the changing human perception of what originality implies in the face of CAD-to-production just isn’t part of their business. Making spare parts for humans and cars is.

It was nice to see what they were up to, and it’s always exiting to learn first hand about hight tech stuff, but now I feel I’d need to complement this excursion with a visit to the lo-fi end of the spectrum. Are there any home-fabbers in Gothenburg? Point them in my direction.

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