Laptopogram

April 26

About

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. 



‘Laptopogram’ is a misnomer - I reckon they can be made with pretty much any monitor. Perhaps ‘Luminous Screen Emulsion Transfers’ is a better. 


Here, however, the negative is a digital image - and is flashed for a little time onto the paper before developing the image in a darkroom. 


These prints were made with an IBM R51 Thinkpad running Lucid Lynx with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels.


All prints were developed on Ilford Ilfospeeed RC Deluxe 5 Glossy paper using Tetenal Neofin Blau with water as a stop bath and a fixer of unknown provenance.

The scans are not  true-color. Scroll down to see an approximation.

Dimensions vary; most are around a few inches by another few inches. 


Here is the script to turn the monitor on and off:



#!/bin/sh
sudo vbetool dpms on ; sleep 2.0; sudo vbetool dpms off



Thank you to Alex and Manu for much patience and support.


Lufja EZ.


Do drop me a line.

This was developed during a residency at Fabrica.it, Benetton’s experimental lab in Treviso.

- Aditya Mandayam

April 25
+
April 24

Notes

0. For the past few years I made prints like this: shoot-develop-scan film, print digitally. The Laptopogram is an inverse.


1. By ‘folding’ the negative and the light source into a single object this technique significantly reduces the time associated with either standard analog processes or  
techniques using ‘digital negatives’.


2. Developer: 1 ampule Tetenal Neofin Blau + 500ml water at 20°C
Fixer: 25 to 40ml fixer + 500ml 

This yielded about 20 prints.


3. The lowest exposure time that worked was 1.0 seconds. The longest - 13 seconds. 


4. My monitor is fairly dim and is 15”. Repeating this with higher resolution / brighter / bigger monitors might be fun.


5. The first time around I made about 30 prints out of which I posted my favorites. In the latter cases, the paper was pressed right  up against the screen. A slight distance led to blur, diffusion and generally grayer images.


6. To-do: using actual paper developer, of course; perhaps caffenol; fibre paper; perhaps gum bichromate.


7. Some images were made with scans of film negatives; some are digital images; some are digital photos of drawings and graphics.