scansion
05:40 on Tuesday, March 04, 2003 • 3 responses
Welcome to those of you visiting from 28mm. Looking for images? You’ll find them in the specular highlights photo galleries and the gestalt photolog.
I’d like to take this opportunity to prove to etherf@rm regulars that I haven’t been idle between posts. Among other things, I’ve been working on a project for 28mm. It’s an honor to be in the same issue as Heather Champ, of whom I’ve been a longtime fan, and Chrys, whose work I got to know and admire as soon as I joined the pixelpile crew.
The project was great fun and a stimulating challenge, but for several days it had me waking up at the crack of dawn and going to bed well past my bedtime, and in many ways I’m still recuperating from that. Scansion (the project) is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time…I bought that particular scanner over a year or so ago with the idea of remote scanning in mind. It’ll be something I continue, that’s for sure. The images are quite rewarding (albeit in an “I love entropy” sort of way).
I don’t claim any proprietary rights to remote scanning. Everybody knows that people have been xeroxing their asses on office photocopiers for decades, and my experiment is really just an offshoot of that endeavor. I’m sure someone in the recent past has walked around with a notebook and a scanner, imaging everyday objects.
I’ll tell you this much: I have mad, mad respect for that person.
I got harassed by cops and pedestrians alike. People riding by on their bikes would turn around to make sure they actually saw what they thought they saw. My favorite exchange took place at a parking meter. I was in the process of scanning when a police car pulls up. Keep in mind that the scanning process isn’t a short one—it can take up to two or three minutes or more, depending on the scanning resolution, so when this conversation took place I couldn’t actually see the cop, who was behind me. I was standing there, about 11pm, holding this bright, blinking device up to a parking meter, and my PowerBook was sitting next to me on a little stepladder I brought along.
cop: What you doing?
me: um. An art project. (in reality I responded with a question: ‘an art project?’)
cop: I see. Your ‘art project’ doesn’t involve you taking quarters from that meter, does it?
me: No.
cop: OK then.
He had reason to be suspicious, I suppose. From a distance it probably looked like I was trying to cut the meter open with a laser beam. Still…if I had access to a portable laser beam which could cut through metal, do you really think I’d be gunning for parking meters?
The image above is one from the set of images at 28mm. This entry’s archive contains some images that were edited out of the submitted collection, as well as some cropped images at their original resolution (the original images are over 93MB).
Lastly, but certainly not leastly, many thanks to Rachel James and all others invovled for their efforts on 28mm.
