scanning and rescanning

I first had the idea to try this when I saw a story about someone had posted a selfie to instagram repeatedly downloading and uploading the image, to witness it slowly decay as it was subject to instagrams compression algorithms.

I thought what if I do something a little more hands on, and print and re-scan a photo to see how long it takes until it completely disintegrates. I was surprised as it took a lot less time than I had expected, within 12 frames it had gone from a photo of an abandoned motorbike to black smudgy box. I did post this sequence to instagram, and thought about uploading that repeatedly to see what would happen, but that feels a little too meta.

I do enjoy silly projects like this, enjoying the benefits of modern full frame sensors, nice glass and then taking the resulting crisp image file and deliberately sabotaging it, this time reducing it down to a grainy mess.

Start with the original file:

The exact same image after the first print and scan, you can already see it’s lost a lot of that digital crispness. These were all printed on a basic laser printer, to really highlight the lofi effect (and just because that’s the printer I had access to).

Now follows the full slow disintegration.