Jan 21, 2011: History of desktop printing in one book

[Undertoad]

No, it's art. French artist Xavier Antin set this up; it's four different desktop printing technologies, lines up so that the output of one printer becomes the input of another printer. In a row, they are a stencil duplicator, a spirit duplicator, a laser printer, and an inkjet printer.

He then did four-color printing and created a book. He had the stencil printer do magenta, the spirit printer do cyan, the laser printer do black and the inkjet printer do yellow.



And that's the art installation. Doesn't look great, but it's kind of amazing that it works at all. Four-color printing was notoriously difficult and expensive before our modern era. If one of the colors is a fraction of an inch off, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. Modern printers can get it right for cheap, only because they manage the process with modern computing.

And maybe that's part of the point here.

installation via neatorama