‘Afterlife’ Printer / pencil
This poster is part of ‘Afterlife’; a project that investigates the impact of electronic waste on the global community.
A 1:1 scale drawing of an Epson 1270 Printer parts with a mars lumograph 5H pencil.
These posters are part of a project that looks at the objects we live with, and aims to communicate issues of complexity and means of production in a clear and simple way. For this poster, a cheap consumer printer was dismantled, each component carefully drawn to scale, and juxtaposed with a pencil, also drawn to scale. The parts are arrayed according to size. A sense of scale is key to these images. For the smaller posters, all of the larger parts are overlaid, in a six colour screen-printing process.
Both objects are tools for physical mark-making and communication, yet the difference between them in terms of sophistication and intricacy is vast. It is truly incredible to witness the delicacy, precision engineering and sheer number of man-hours that has gone into producing a modern printer, and equally impressive when we consider how affordable such advanced tools have become. The pencil occupies the opposite end of the spectrum – where the printer is complex, a pencil is incredibly simple, an elegant, uncomplicated, user-friendly design.
What can these two examples of communication technology tell us about the state of ‘progress’, possible futures, and our relationship with everyday tools? Is it important that we can all understand how a pencil works, yet most of us can only wonder at how a printer functions? Who knows – at the very least, these images have been great fun to create, satisfying a juvenile fascination with taking things apart!
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