UNI [THESIS PROJECT] Printer Decay
March 21st, 2009 | Richard Almond
I’ve had a few funny looks recently as I’ve been collecting this printer spool which finds itself spread around uni. There’s an ancient printer in particular up on the 5th floor, which is rather temperamental. Every so often it will pump out a sheet of this code. I presume its the HEX or ASCII of the image it was supposed to print, but it produces some really nice looking graphics.
There is a sort of dialogue that takes place between the user and the printer, an argument almost, as it tries its best to ruin your expensive glossy paper. You have to trick it into printing your image, rather than the page of code. With practice you can learn the combination of buttons to press to get the thing to work, but every now and then it will spurt out a sheet of this code, just as you think it’s started to behave. If I could find out how this happens, and if I could find an old printer, it would be great to do some further experimentation to see what sort of outcome I could achieve. As interesting as it is however, its not ideal the day before a hand-in…