Wait, Thats not a Camera?
Digging through my parents piles of old forgotten tech one day, through the dozens and dozens of yards of tangled cords, I stumbled across an old printer. Curious, I took it out and had a look. By some miracle I found the power cord in the nest of wires and plugged it up. Naturally the printing mechanism itself had failed, leaving it in a shallow and dusty grave but I couldnt shake the feeling that there was something useful I could do with it. Then it dawned on me, The scanner. Maybe the scanner still works, I mean its not like it ever got nearly as much abuse as the rest of the machine.
I dug up an SD card from my camera bag, put it into the machine, tossed in a random note and fired it up. After what felt like an eternity of strange mechanical noises, It chimed. I opened the lid and everything looked the same. Pulling out the SD card and putting it in the laptop, I was pleased to find an almost perfect scan of the note.
“Hey I wonder if this thing has color?”
The gears in my mind started spinning and I needed to know this things limits. Grabbing a piece of paper and quickly scribbling up something detailed and with the only other colored pen I had on me, I drew a rain cloud. Again, I gave the gadget its SD card, scribblings, and its job and it just got straight back to work like it didn't just spend 10 years forgotten in the bottom of a closet. It whirred and whined, whipping one more piece of work for me to wait and watch for. Ding! Out comes the SD card, Into the laptop, and Boom! There it is, clear as day with surprising quality.
Shocked with just how much clarity it carried, I couldn't cancel my quest to come up with a complication that the contraption conveyed. I looked closer. Looking for a distortion in my lines or an off color, I realized that my details werent the problem, But strangely enough, the problem was with the details of the background of the image on the paper itself. I looked back at the physical paper but no, It definitely was the scanners seemingly small slip-up. I looked back at the old image and sure enough it was there too.
The scanner, for some reason, Left hardly noticable, but a noticeable long track down the image that was ever so slightly inconsistent with the rest of the image. If you look closer at the image you may be able to see it, But here's a better example:
Seeing this I wasn't sure how to take it. On one hand it could work as a regular document scanner but then any old phone or camera can do that so whats the point in dragging it home. I took one last close look and realized I was wrong. It wasnt just one discrepancy of inconsistency, no, they were Everywhere. Maybe I could do something with that information... I wonder... How far can this thing scan anyways?... I held my hand over the device making a peace sign and went to start the scan.
"Wait? Will it even work with the lid open? "
click
Again, It fired right up I watched its bright laser-like beam move across under the entire surface of the glass, going directly under my hand and right past it. Ding! SD Out, Laptop Up, Gallery Open. The result was fascinating, It was like the parts of my hand closest looked fine but even a few milimeters away from the glass it was very blurry. It almost even looked fake, Like a camera with monumentally short focus. Unfortunately since then I've lost the original scan but another image captured of my hair resting on the plate demonstrates clearly how only the hair actually on the surface has any chance of being recognizable
Notably, Those long artifacts I mentioned early were still well and alive, This time hiding themselves in a sea of grey. When I took that image of my hand and brought it into the software I use to make my art, and I started tweaking things and messing with stuff, They resonated themselves as an intensly unique pattern that lay across the background of my art. Looking back at the main image of this project, You will see the long striations strewn throughout the main substance of everything but the subject.
Needless to say I learned my lesson that day, Old shit is awesome!