A friend’s Facebook post:

‘Uh oh. I just tried to zoom in on a picture – in a book – using the iPad-fingers-moved-apart-manoeuvre. In my defence, the page was shiny.’

I sympathise: I’ve been looking at some illustrated books this week and reflecting on how rarely you can actually see the detail you need to see in a reproduction of a painting. In this sense, digital technology seems like a distinct advance on print. The downside is that we are going to lose any sense of scale–the relationship between the body and the artefact cannot yet be reproduced, nor does anyone seem to care much about it. But the size of a painting, or of a book for that matter, would in the past have been part of the point of it, framing your whole experience.

So I hope my 3-D printer, when it arrives, will allow me to create a LIFE-SIZE reproduction of the Mona Lisa.