Jamin: Hey, everybody. I'm Jamin Warren. I'm the founder of KILLSCREEN. KILLSCREEN is an arts and culture organization committed to advancing the practice of interdisciplinary play. We founded it back in 2010. We seek to drive the intersection of design, culture, and impact through cross-disciplinary collaboration. We want to show the world why play matters. We're doing talks like this to help break down barriers traditionally segregating playing games from other creative disciplines. We're trying to foster a diverse community of creators with significant relationships with the world around us. Thank you so much for joining us.

This is our second webinar online event. Please bear with us if there are any technical issues. I always ask for forgiveness in advance—just a couple of housekeeping notes. Let's see here. For Zoom, please hide non-video participants. If you see Camille, for example, please hide them. Camille's working in the background. We'll be recording this and posting it later. If you missed something or want to go back and rewatch this, it'll be available. We'll send an email out to you along with a post-event survey. There's Q&A. Feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation.

We'll do our best to field your questions as we go, so you don't have to necessarily wait until the end and say, "I have a great question about something specific." Feel free. We may not be able to get to it. If it's a technical question, you could also use the Q&A function, which will be at the bottom if you have a question. You also follow us on Twitter @killscreen and Instagram @killscreendotcom. All right. Let's jump in. We'll give a brief introduction to Lauren. Thank you so much for joining us. Lauren is a New Jersey multimedia object maker, illustrator, and art conservator.

Her work has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum Arnhem in Amsterdam and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in New York City. You should have heard of New York City Jewelry Week and Peters Valley School of Craft. Her work has also been featured in Hyperallergic. Lauren attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, which received a BFA in metals jewelry, CAD/CAM in 2019.

She's currently studying part-time at Rowan College of South Jersey at Rowan University and Temple University as a pre-program art conservator. She was a studio assistant at Peters Valley School of Craft and an artist-in-residence at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. She is based in Philadelphia, which we both have in common, being both Philly people. I promise there will be no questions about gritty or Philly cheesesteaks. Do you have a favorite cheesesteak place in the Philadelphia Metropolitan area?

Lauren: Not really. I'm not a big cheesesteak fan. That's sacrilegious.

Jamin: That is the correct answer.

Lauren: I've never been to Geno's.

Jamin: Again, totally, totally fine. All right. Well, Lauren, let's get started. I'd love to hear a little about your background and how you came to the material culture of games as the medium. Tell us a little bit about your experience. What kinds of things were you into growing up? How did you decide to follow this particular creative passion?

Lauren: I went to Tyler School of Art. We have a metals drawing CAD/CAM program there. I liked that program. I was attracted to it because I wanted how technology-focused it was. What brought me in was they had a huge 3D printing lab with, I think, 15 3D printers. All that shiny technology was desirable to me because I had been really into the topic of science fiction in art for a long time. I had also been really into video games before I went to college. When I was little, my first video gaming console was the Little Game Boy Advance. I would play Pokemon a lot and Zelda.

I went to school and got into 3D printing and technology. Then I also learned how to work with metal and different types of plastics and stuff, and the art form and just these small sculptures were beautiful to me because I could use almost any material I wanted. Then from that, I went to Peters High School of Craft, where I learned more about the historical background of craft, and from there, I've just been interacting more with the contemporary craft field at large, which has led me to where I am today, becoming an art conservator.

Jamin: I don't think we discussed this, but on the sci-fi side, so much gets created. So much is done digitally now but certainly for earlier sci-fi films. Were there any particularly resonant for you as a child or looking at the things created for particular movies or TV shows?

Lauren: Well, I know that lots of them used to use a lot of tiny models, but in terms of special effects, I was really into horror movies. Well, I still I'm really into horror movies. I liked all those special effects that John Carpenter used in The Thing. That was a lot of silicone and plastics and stuff. That's the kind of materials we were working on within the school. I found that interesting. Especially all the fake gore. I liked horror movies with the actual special effects with that.

Jamin: As a child, you were not making anything prop elements scaring your parents.

Lauren: No, I couldn't access that kind of stuff. I was still interested when I got to school and realized I could make that. Once I realized there was much less of a barrier to access with all these special effects, I started watching more of those movies.

Jamin: That makes a lot of sense. You studied jewelry and CAD/CAM at Tyler. Tell me a little about your first experiences with metal and jewelry. Was there a moment where it clicked for you where you felt like, "Oh, wow, I can do some of the things I've seen in virtual spaces or cinematic spaces? I can start to make those things myself."

Lauren: Yes. Well, one professor inspired me in 3D printing because he would 3D print these forms for his jewelry that you could not make by hand. That was the appeal of the 3D printing in small sculptures and jewelry, art jewelry. You could complicate things because the computer would do all the work for you. You have to tell it what to do.

You could still use digital tools and have the presence of your artistic style in hand with that, and that was attractive to me. Then what sold me was we were 3D printing wax and then casting it with traditional metal casting equipment. Although molten metal becoming something I saw in a computer was so cool. That sealed the deal for me to decide to focus on that.

Jamin: No, that makes a lot of sense. Well, along those lines, here it goes. Next slide here. We asked you to share some of the things you were working on in the past. What's happening here, and how it relates to your work for the uninitiated and those unfamiliar with your process?

Lauren: In my art, I use this metal process called anodizing with titanium. Anodizing is when you run an electrical current through titanium, and the chemical reaction creates an oxide layer on the metal which is a bright color depending on how much electricity you run through it. It's just a process you can use to make your materials colorful.

I was attracted to all the colors because I had been doing these illustrations and taking inspiration from all these saturated art with movies and video games. I jumped at the opportunity to use it in my 3D work, this whole body of work. One of my other professors at school, Mallory Weston, her entire body of work has a ton of titanium. I got to be taught by one of the people familiar with it. I ended up investing a lot of time in it.

Jamin: Is it difficult for that color side to work with metals? Is that a tricky part of the process, like working with strong colors like that in your particular work?

Lauren: Sometimes, it can be not easy with metals to be a lot of different colors. Sometimes you have to use patinas that are strong chemicals and stuff. From a studio perspective, it can be hazardous to do it a lot. You don't want to expose yourself to all these different chemicals all the time, but with the anodizing process, you don't need any crazy chemicals. When I had just graduated, it was really attractive to me in my studio because I didn't have to worry about inhaling noxious fumes. All you need is like-

Jamin: Same here. Same with my everyday life.

Lauren: Yes, you don't want to put yourself at risk because you want to be doing it for a long time. The anodizing process was attractive because it was helpful from a studio safety perspective. Also, it's easy to replicate it repeatedly with the same consistency because it's a scientific process. You can standardize all the different elements to make the same thing frequently.

Jamin: Is this something you're doing in this image right here? Is this something that you're doing at home? What is your setup for this particular piece?

Lauren: Yes, this is just in my studio. How you do it is you have a little, I don't know, like a power box. This is just an antidote thing machine that provides electricity. Then you put your piece in water so that the water will carry the electricity evenly over the entire surface. Then the part I'm touching, the piece that gets colored, is connected to the power source. When you touch the metal, it completes the circuit. Then when the circuit's complete, that's when the anodizing processes happening. When I removed my hand, it stopped because the circuit was no longer completed. I'm wearing a rubber glove because if I weren't, I would accidentally electrocute myself, which I did, but I no longer make that mistake.

Jamin: Got it. Yes, we have a question from Diana Karnes, who asks why the color keeps disappearing and reappearing, aside from the fact that it's a looping image.

Lauren: The image is looping, but the anodizing process goes through a spectrum of colors because the oxide layer becomes thicker and thicker, refracting light differently. If you stop at any point in the process, that's the color you'll get. Sometimes I'll let it run longer on some components of the piece and other parts to get nice contrast in color.

Jamin: Oh, fantastic. That's cool. Thank you, Diana, for your question. If anybody else has any questions, please do. I have an unusual pronunciation of my name. If you also have a unique or would like me to pronounce your name correctly, I will do my best, but you can also type it in phonetically. We can do that as well. All right. Well, we can keep going here. All right. This is a Plaines of Mystic and Material Memories. It's a digital collage on matte paper. Tell me a little about the triptych structure you had put together. We talked about your background in illustration and how that intersects with metalwork.

I'd love to hear a little about how you're putting this piece together and how something like this gets interpreted into metalwork and jewelry.

Lauren: I wanted to make a triptych because I was looking at a lot of medieval art and stained glass. I am a big fan of Hieronymus Bosch, and he's made a lot of crazy triptychs; I wanted to make a triptych, and I also tried to use it as an opportunity to do some world-building. Illustrators do a lot of world-building, and artists do a lot of world-building. I wanted there to be a lot of density of information. The middle panel is more of a gateway type of theme. It has all these keys, and then there's an actual arch. The three-pronged object refers to a dowsing rod, a divination tool people use to find water sources.

The middle panel is about searching and finding this gateway to this dimension where I'm doing all my world-building; I imagine all my objects and body of work coming from this strange, timeless dimension. That's the middle panel, and then the left and the right panels are the different facets of this world. The left panel has more natural imagery, creatures, animals, and stuff, so that would be the mystic plane. Then the right one is correct from my perspective; I don't know if it's everybody else's, but the right one has more material things, objects and gems and bottles of vessels and candles and stuff. That's the more tangible side of the--

The mystic and the material are two sides of the same coin. They're opposites, but they go together, especially if you're thinking about something magical like alchemy. There are a lot of internal parts to it, but then it's based a lot on the material. I was trying to show all the different facets of this world; I was thinking about my work.

Jamin: Yes. We typically think of your craft as different from a screen-based medium. When you were first working with jewelry and technology, did you get any pushback, and people were like, "No, you're supposed to," When you're doing jewelry and metalwork, it needs to be, you don't start here? You don't start with something like this. You begin in another place.

Lauren: I think just because the program I started out in never really saw it as a dichotomy, but that perspective does exist in the field where it's like, "Okay, well, this is a traditional medium," the traditional medium is based in the tangible and all these technological things are taking away from the tradition of the press. The way my mentors taught me, nobody ever really saw it as a dichotomy. It doesn't have to be a dichotomy. There can be both to make something more significant than the sum of its parts.

Jamin: No, that's such a great point. Let's talk about this Synthetic Relic. Please tell me a little about the relationship between what we saw previously and then something like this. I know you also have some of your pieces with you, but can you tell me a little about that transition? You went from designing something on a screen to this much more physical process.

Lauren: I'm still making these types of objects using the computer. I will lay out all my metal fabrication on a 2D plane so that when I cut and saw and filed it all out, it's easier for me to fabricate. The process starts visually but ends up being tangible in the end. In this piece, conceptually, I thought about how pendulums are a divination tool. I was thinking more about the magical side of it. I was thinking about something that you might arrive at amid some journey, and the illustrations on the piece are celestial. I was thinking about that otherworldly dimension all my art is inhabiting.

Then I wanted it to look a bit like a puzzle box because I was thinking about the box from the Hellraiser movies where you open it, and then it creates another dimension. Then the claw referenced the medieval and fantasy worlds I'm inspired by. That's how I made this whole piece. Then I used anodizing to make the different colors reference my illustration. I have it right here. I'll show you how big it is compared to an actual person. It's big.

Jamin: Yes, of course.

Lauren: You can see my illustrations and stuff on it. That's another way my hand, the style, and the artistic hand are present. I'm connecting my tangible, fabricated metal pieces to my more virtual illustrations that are taking inspiration from this 8-bit style.

Jamin: Yes. You mentioned early horror films or SciFi films using a scale to make things look larger or smaller. That's definitely at play here too. Looking at the image, you might- this could be very large, or it'd be tiny, and as an earring, you can work on both different-

Lauren: Yes. I like that.

Jamin: Yes. Along those lines, do you think of your work as being wearable? Do you have an idea? We often say that writers like you should write with an audience in mind; is there like a person or-- Yes. What do you think about the wearability of your objects as part of your process?

Lauren: I think a lot of my objects are just more sculptural, like more wall objects, even some of my smaller pieces, my woven pixel series, which is these, they're like not-- You're not going to wear that to I don't know, Christmas party. You mentioned this comparison about how runway fashion is not necessarily- it's just like a concept. My work's based on the idea of wearable as a function, or it relates to the body in terms of concept, but it isn't more of a-- It's less of a production line and more of an exhibition function.

Jamin: Yes. Could you showcase what you just showed a second ago?

Lauren: This one?

Jamin: Yes, exactly. There's been a more profound interest amongst game designers in using 8-bit, and some of that's nostalgia-driven; it's a function of games that people grew up with. What does the pixel represent for you, and how did that play for the piece you just showed?

Lauren: This was the first one I did with this technique where I'm like weaving the metal. I was trying to bridge my illustration with my tangible work. I had already been using this 8-bit pixel style. I was attracted to that because of the nostalgia and the information density with concise pixels. It allowed me to make many of these little symbols that I like to use, like, how hieroglyphics would work, and communicate a lot of information.

I was attracted to it in that way. Then I also really liked the colorful style because I have a more maximalist approach to color. I wanted those two elements, which drew me to the 8-bit, so I tried to carry that over to my metal. The density of information works when you're trying to make something out of fabrication because then you don't have to try and do realism; you can do something more abstract.

Jamin: Absolutely. It's interesting because, like you as someone making something physical or looking to video games for inspiration, it's also working the other way. You see this with game makers, where they're often creating digital objects. They want those digital objects to have a tactility feel to them as well. Are folks making video games actively thinking about things in this anthropological way right now? This is something that, if it existed in the real world, would have resonance, meaning, and the process associated with it.

Lauren: Yes. When people are making these video games, they're building on this lore of this world and trying to incentivize you to interact with it. This incentive to interact with it makes everything have inherent meaning. I'm thinking about how to say this. These objects in the game have intrinsic meaning, and they're not necessarily constrained by the real. This meaning also exists in real-world objects; people have sentimental attachments to things and sometimes reference greater community sentimentalities. Video game objects also present that connection to different parts of the world.

Jamin: There's a generational gap there. I think we're seeing that now with digital goods, whether those are the ones that are happening through game environments or obviously through things like NFTs; I think for a generation that's grown up with digital goods, the idea of these things would have some value is not that unusual at the

Lauren: I played Hades recently, and you can collect all these keepsakes in the game that are, like, you get them after achieving a special relationship with someone. People will give each other jewelry and stuff after being in a specific type of relationship, so that's similar.

Jamin: I want to talk about this next piece, Synthetic Relic. I scrolled back here. What is the relationship between this object and the previous, much larger one that you showed?

Lauren: Yes, okay. This was the first one I made in this series. I called the whole series Synthetic Relic because I wanted it to be something from the past, the relic part, and then something a little bit from the future. I had been looking at these imagined futures from other science fiction in many of my works. Still, I realized that imagining these futures like that happening in the past, and then I was also thinking about, as an art conservator, how we carry the past into the future.

That became the title Synthetic Relic. The next to my other pieces is different from this kind of piece. All come from this world that it's a little bit timeless; the world is atemporal, and it is the better word to describe it. This piece and the large pendulum piece I made are both something you would arrive at and be like an event in a story, you know what I mean, and a unique thing.

In this piece, it would be interesting to imagine somebody taking it off a wall, which could cause something to happen, like in Indiana Jones when he takes it off the pedestal. Then all of a sudden, the temple starts collapsing. That's what I imagined for this piece.

Jamin: I presume that when these are displayed, you do not encourage people to take them off the wall.

Lauren: I wish I could, but exhibitors always want something else.

Jamin: I know, that makes sense. I want to explore the digital side of what you were creating here. Can you walk through your use of digital tools for fundamentally creating an object like this? We talked about what that looks like from your school days, but from a process standpoint, what are we looking at here, and how does this manifest itself in the actual creation of the final piece?

Lauren: There are two types of processes on this. The one on the left, the claws, that's how I made the wall mounts for my pieces. That workflow differs from how I make the layouts for metal fabrication, which is what you see on the right. They both happen in the same program, Rhino, and I like using Rhino because the license fee is accessible to independent artists.

The one on the left is I'm just 3D modeling it or 3D printing. This is just you're using different commands in the program to make something that's 3D, and then you send it to the 3D printer, and then they send it to you in the mail. Then the one on the right is-- There are two parts to this. There's the actual line drawing that I print out on just a regular laser inkjet printer. I print that out after I've done all my little pictures and stuff, and I make a paper model if I feel like putting in a lot of effort, or I go right to the metal.

What I do is I cut it out, and I make a paper model, and then I cut it out. Then I attached it to the flat surface of the metal, and then I just saw it out with a little handsaw. I sawed out all the lines I do with my little woven structures. Then I can fabricate that as a traditional jeweler would. This is what you see here. These structures started as a drawing in the Rhino software.

This is what I'm talking about: the computer can do things that would take so long for you to do by hand. I can make all these little schematics and print five to six of them instead of redrawing them a million times, or I can draw all these little, perfectly parallel lines on the computer so quickly compared to doing it by hand, where it would be more time-consuming.

When making this kind of art, you're trying to use your time efficiently, so using the computer and the digital tools allows me to focus on different elements and not have to worry about the minutia.

Jamin: Absolutely. When you're working at this stage right here, are you thinking about materials, what materials you're going to be creating ostensibly, or is it more about the shape and the form, and then you'll figure out afterward here's what I'm going actually to construct this.

Lauren: A little bit of both. On the right, there's the sketch in front of the human model. At that point, I need to think about what specific metal I will use for this. I like to use titanium because it's colorful. I want to use steel because it's strong as a skeleton, but I need to figure out exactly where all those elements will go.

This next to the person is when I'm sketching it to see what it might look like. Then when I'm going to the schematic, I think more literally about, like, "Oh, this piece is going to be made of steel. This piece is going to be made of titanium. I'm going to put a screw here so that they attached at this point so that it can make this larger form." Then when I was doing the 3D printing, I had to be cognizant of the parameters the printer could print in because if I were not working with it, it would not look very good or work.

Jamin: That makes sense. All right. Have you ever had to make any significant changes? Like when you've moved into this stage, for example, have you ever had to make any substantial changes to what you thought, like, "Oh, well, this worked on the computer, but honestly, I'm going to have to make some serious adjustments to what this looks like."

Lauren: Yes. Sometimes the material wants to work with you differently than you've planned. I have spent hours and hours on a piece, just sawing out all these little tiny lines. Then all of a sudden, in the fabrication, which is almost one of the last steps, I realize that bending a certain point snaps something off every single time. Well, I have to figure out a different way to do this. The more you do it, that's present in craft, whether you're using digital or analog methods.

The more you do it, the more you learn how to do something better, so that is just like how the craft works.

Jamin: Absolutely. On the ZBrush side, can you tell us a bit about your workflow working in ZBrush and that experience of moving from? I suspect you may have worked with other design programs like that, but you must be literate in these two different spaces. What is your workflow for ZBrushis for anybody looking to explore that tool more deeply?

Lauren: Yes. ZBrush and Rhino are my favorite 3D modeling programs, and they're different. The program works in different ways. ZBrush is more vectors and similar to 2D with Illustrator compared to Photoshop. If I have a rough shape I want to make, I can make it in Rhino a little bit quicker, and then what I'll do is I'll take that file that I've made and into ZBrush, and then ZBrush is you're modeling a lump of digital clay. I can do some details that Rhino wants to avoid doing in ZBrush.

I can draw it and model it and maybe do like the fine-tuning and the surface detail work in ZBrush, and so that is my workflow is, I'll rough it out in Rhino, and then I'll take the ZBrush, and I'll do the surface and do maybe some things that I'm not sure. That would take way longer in Rhino.

Jamin: That makes a lot of sense.

Lauren: I sometimes use Blender because it is the light version of ZBrush but less expensive.

Jamin: Got it. For anyone looking to get started, maybe somebody who's working from a more traditional object-oriented, physical object, how would you recommend them like getting started or if they want to incorporate this into their existing practice and vice versa for someone maybe who's working with these tools, but now might want to make the jump over into physical fabrication. What would you recommend?

Lauren: The ZBrush interface could be more straightforward if you go from hand fabrication to 3D fabrication. You might want to try Blender because it's free and low stakes if you're trying it out. You can use those skills in ZBrush if you decide that's the way you want to work, but then so try Blender or try Rhino because Rhino I like because it has a lower license fee compared to other programs, and there are lots of resources online probably that use Rhino.

How to make this thing? It'll show you how to make this ring or this kind of tool in Rhino. It's straightforward to do something step-by-step. That's how I would do it if you're going from analog to digital. Then if you're going from digital to analog, it depends on where you're trying to end up, but that's how I work. I'll use digital tools and end up with analog. You can use Rhino or ZBrush to sketch because you're already familiar with that.

Sometimes if I try sketching in a notebook, it doesn't look how people would think an artist's sketches look. It's like a lot of really ugly thumbnails that I've drawn. If you're comfortable in a digital workspace, use those tools to do your sketching and try and be loose with that, and then you can make something that would help guide you in a hand fabrication setting, which is how I work myself.

Jamin: Well, can you tell us a little about some of the weaving practices you use in terms of what we're looking at here for this particular piece?

Lauren: Yes. This piece was the second piece I made with this woven titanium workflow. I was at a residency in Houston at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and I started doing this. I was inspired by one of the other residents who just did weaving. Weaving, usually you think of it as making cloth or something, and the threads are fragile. You see less of it than you do in this way, but the person whose work inspired me was weaving cut-up vinyl billboards. That artist's name is Tim Gantraf.

I liked how they used billboard images to create woven images. I thought, well, I could weave my illustrations into the metal by cutting metal strips, so I hand-sawed every single one of those little lines you see on the right. It took a long time, but the point is that the craft can be meditative in how tedious it can be. When I do these pieces, I sit down and listen to a podcast or an audiobook, and then, six hours later, I'm done.

Jamin: You're time dilated.

Lauren: Yes. You zone out, and then suddenly, your work is done. Craft has been like that for people forever, and so then after I saw these lines out, I have these little strips of titanium that I've prepped and anodized and colored, and then I can weave them, like someone would be weaving a basket or on a loom, and then I have the piece right here. I can show you the back of it. This is the piece. Then initially, I had been trying to do an image on here. I had drawn this image with all these symbols and stuff in my triptych, but the material didn't want to work with me.

I ended up just trying to do like this cloud, and that's another example of I get to the analog part, and it's the material is like, no, you can't do that. You have to roll with it. I created this, but then you can see on the back this is what the back looks like. It looks like the back of if you turn like a rug or a woven tapestry to the back, this is what the back looks like. You can see how it's connected to these other types of crafts work.

Jamin: That's cool. Well, we got a couple more questions, and then we'll open it up for Q&A. We had a request. We sent out inquiries to everybody, or I requested folks. Do you have any things that you wanted to ask Lauren? Someone had asked w what pieces become iconic to fans, viewers, and players and why. This person, they're asking, both in a digital and a physical context for video games that you've played, they wanted some insight on why you think certain pieces get a hold of people.

Lauren: Well, the first thing I can think of is in video games, the whole Pokemon franchise; the Pokeball is the object that you think of the most; it's part of every single game because it's what catches the Pokemon. Sometimes these objects also function as symbols and logos. As I said before, objects carry all this meaning so the objects can serve as a shorthand for many other things.

It communicates much, even without words, so things become very popular for a franchise or a game. It means more than just the image of it, like the colors and the pixels.

Jamin: There's also something with games. Like games in particular, so much of what we do is active at some level, and so there are very few video games in which the character does not have something or wear something, or it's not just like in an amorphous, you look at something like Pong by contrast. I think it's maybe the pong ball or whatever it might be, but it's undoubtedly.

Lauren: You think of Pong, and you immediately think of the image of it, which is like the-

Jamin: The pongs. Is the ball the Pong, or are these the Pong?

Lauren: I've never played Pong.

Jamin: Is it the sound that the ball makes when it hits the paddles?

Lauren: That would probably be people who would hear that and immediately get flashbacks.

Jamin: Yes, in any case, the games, because they're so active, we work with objects in games in some shape or fashion. We have emotional experiences when we play games. I definitely can see what you're saying. Anyone who's played Pokemon, You have an iconic experience that you had.

Lauren: It just ends up meaning more than what it is.

Jamin: Yes. All right. Cool. I wanted to discuss it; you said you're studying to be an art conservator. How are you finding that balance between conservation, a past-based practice, and the work you currently deal with in terms of looking at speculative futures and thinking about what will be someday?

Lauren: Well, in the actual day-to-day, my artwork, the processes are technical and scientific, like that anodizing process. I said it was scientific because you have to make sure your anodizing bath is the same every time, like the scientific method being the same every time. Then art conservators have to know a lot of chemistry, so the day-to-day is similar between my art practice and becoming an art conservator, learning all the science. Then I think conceptually and thematically, art conservators, a lot of their work involves researching the past, art history, and everything.

The purpose of all that is to make the object lost in the future. You're trying to make these objects last longer than you. You're participating in something that isn't so immediate in the past and the future. You're doing all this work for the future. Then that relates to me in my art practice, thinking about the end from the point of the past.

Jamin: Yes, that makes sense. Being acutely aware of these things by virtue that there are these things that will live on past whatever happens with ZBrush or Rhino or any of the digital programs. The fact that you have physical objects is a massive issue in digital conservation, where so much of it's tied to these commercially available tools. There is something beautiful about thinking, "Hey, how can we create something digital or physical that will live on past when my time?"

Lauren: Yes. That's what I like about art conservation, and it's what I like about science fiction and thinking about the future. The current moment can seem immediate sometimes when you think about all these traditions, people like traditions because it connects them to the past. You're thinking about these traditions, and you're thinking about the past, and it just makes you a part of something greater than your current moment.

Jamin: Yes. Well, let's open it up for questions before we go. If you have any questions for Lauren, you can pop those into the Q&A. Let's see. All right, so one question we have is, what excites you about Zbrush and Rhino as opposed to other 3D modeling tools? I know you got into it a bit, but if you care to unpack that more.

Lauren: Yes, well, ZBrush and Rhino, as I said, are different, but they work well for my workflow. Also, there's a lot of potential with them. Between the two of them, it's exciting because you can create so many different things. That is what drew me to the field of metals jewelry and CAD/CAM and contemporary crafts, in the beginning, was that you weren't constrained. The potential with ZBrush and Rhino is inspiring to me because, between those two tools, you can model almost anything.

I have yet to explore a lot of other 3D modeling programs. I know that, like I mentioned, Blender. Blender is similar to ZBrush. They're from the same idea. You can make many things with those things, and people use them for many things. That draws me to them and makes me excited about using them. It keeps bringing me back to just sitting in front of my computer.

Jamin: You also do work that references stained glass. You talked about that briefly with the triptychs you'd worked on. What interests you about religious, spiritual, and chemical research and motifs?

Lauren: Well, stained glass just is inherently beautiful. That, first off, draws me to it. Then like I said, I like colorful things. I like all the colors, and then the stained glass is used in many churches. In my one art history class, I remember we studied all the stained glass in Paris. I like all the religious scenes and stuff people use stained glass with. One of the ways that people use stained glass in churches is when the light comes through; it is heavenly.

It makes people's connection with God visible because it uses light to make it more ethereal and illuminates these stories. I'm attracted to the rich storytelling people use stained glass with and all the imagery. Religious art appeals to me because people would make religious art and be patrons of it because they wanted to be a part of something greater than themselves, which is compelling.

Jamin: I meant to draw the eye and add more to it. Hopefully, it will always radiate a magical and memorable experience. Great. Well, Lauren, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Let's see. We can go back here for anyone interested; you can follow Lauren. Lauren's website is Lauren-eckert.com, or follow Lauren on Instagram. Do the same for us, killscreen.com. We publish interviews and wonderful stories every week with exciting and dynamic creators like Lauren.

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