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Confessions of a Dot Monkey
Another Tale of Woe and Wonder from the Modern Age
by David Lytle

I should have seen it coming. All the signs were there. But that's how it always happens, isn't it? You don't know you've gone down the wrong road until after you've left the exit ramp and motored a few miles. Maybe lots and lots of miles. Maybe even had a damn fine time enjoying the road until you realize the last turn you took was the wrong one and your mood sinks faster than your bank balance at the video poker machine at the corner tavern.

This is my confession: I am a Dot Monkey. At first I did it for love. Then I did it for friends. Then I did it for money. It was the light I loved at first: a beam of pencil-thin laser light that traversed my basement, glowing like a rod of rarified neon, transforming motes of dust into glittering diamonds of reflected photonic energy. I was a laser junky right away.

I banished all incandescent, florescent and solar light sources from the basement. My cave was lit with ruby-red laser pointers, tropical-green YAGs, aquamarine argons, even a deep purple from a copper-vapor laser dumped on Ebay by an exiled Croatian scientist. The electrical bill was the first sign. I was consuming more electricity than a small electroplating plant. But who cares when you could see such colors, touch such rainbowed beams, walk through a spider-web of effervescent nothingness?

Then I invited friends over. I had to share. I had to show them what happens when you pass a white-light laser beam from a reconditioned Spectra-Physics ion tube through a Machida grating. An infinite fan of radiant light blossomed out from a pinpoint source; their jaws dropped, their eyes popped, they became junkies, too. It was another sign I missed. People living in my basement. My refrigerator was filled with black-market Chinese laser tubes, still plugged in and running because someone heard the beams would be brighter if the tubes were kept cold and electrified.

Money. I needed it to fix old lasers, buy news lasers, pay electric bills. The guy who sold me the Spectra-Physics knew a laser show company that needed digitizers. They paid for the work, he said. I didn't know what a digitizer was, but if it involved lasers and paid cash, I would do it. They picked me up in rusted-out VW Bug on the corner across the street from the art school I had just stopped attending. Looking back, that was another sign I should have picked up on. But it was too late by then; I was already past the exit ramp. They took me to an industrial building and showed me how to be a dot monkey. All I had to do was connect the dots. Literally.

It was laser graphics work for corporate clients. No beams, just images projected onto a screen, a wall, or a mountainside. One software package turned the client's product photos into line drawings. Another software program put dots on the line drawings; a pair of miniature mirror scanners steered the laser beam and made it follow the dots’ coordinates, looping through dot after dot until the eye couldn't discern individual dots anymore.

A laser-traced wire-frame of, say, a cellular telephone tower contained about 1,000 individual points. About 80 percent of the dots were placed perfectly by the software. The other 20 percent were off just enough to skew the trajectory of the beam and make what was a perfectly rounded microwave transmission dish look like a crushed beer can. The dot monkeys (there were five of us) fixed bad dots. We manually moved dots while watching the laser trace out the image. Sometimes the image popped back into place with just a little nudge, sometimes the image got worse the more you worked on it. Sometimes you moved dozens of dots to fix one bad one. Laser scanners are like that --electromagnetic servos that respond to their own peculiar laws of inertia.

I spend a lot of time sitting in a darkened corner of a cinder-block industrial building, one hand on a mouse and the other on a keyboard, moving points of light on a connect-the-dots drawing while watching an image projected on the back of a stretched bed sheet suspended in front of my computer. It doesn't pay a lot. But the lasers are sharp and crisp, and I have the secret pleasure of watching the spectral glow of a radiant line of scanned laser light all day along.

I work on the laser. The laser works on me. Welcome to the Modern Age.