Laptopograms
April 26, 2010 7:01 AM   Subscribe

Laptopograms
Laptopograms are images made by pressing photosensitive paper onto a laptop screen and flashing an image in a manner not unlike contact printing or photograms. Here are some I made.

I’m looking for prior art along these lines. If you know of any do drop me a line.
posted by vostok (7 comments total)
This post was deleted for the following reason: Aditya, we were extremely clear about you not signing up for Metafilter again. -- cortex

How long do you have to do the exposure for?
posted by dmd at 12:48 PM on April 26, 2010


I made prints starting at 1.0 seconds right upto 13.0 seconds. The developer I had was pretty old and is a film developer, not paper, so results should vary considerably.
posted by vostok at 12:54 PM on April 26, 2010


This is goddamn awesome and even though I spend hours each week trying to think of new, fascinating electronic art ideas I would have never come up with this in a million years.
posted by Damn That Television at 10:44 PM on April 26, 2010


Very beautiful and ghostly. Reminds me of the mistakes my family used to make with their analog cameras -- finger over the light sensor, exposure too long, double exposure, weird developing -- there were a lot that we saved even though they were technically 'wrong'. Do more!
posted by Valet at 8:36 AM on April 27, 2010


Wow! This is really great. I want to try it!
posted by smartypantz at 10:57 AM on April 27, 2010


Back in the day it was fairly standard to capture oscilloscope traces using film. I'm pretty sure Polaroid even made (or maybe Tektronix made?) a film holder that attached with thumbscrews over the tube face. I don't remember how the shutter mechanism worked, but you loaded some Polaroid film in and could basically make a contact print of whatever was being displayed on the tube.

The lab I used to work in had a bunch of old prints produced this way which were kept around because they were neat to look at. If you played around with the controls you could almost get it to draw stuff, I guess. (Although you wouldn't be able to see what you were doing while you were making it, the film would be in the way.)

I have no photos or scans of them but it was a fairly standard way of capturing 'scope traces back before digital storage scopes became common. I think there were systems that used regular 35mm film in modified SLR cameras as well as Polaroid.

That's not really the same as what you are doing, but it's sort of the antecedent.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:51 PM on April 27, 2010


Here's an example of a 'scope tube print.
posted by Kadin2048 at 1:58 PM on April 27, 2010


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