found printed paper

I found a piece of paper, a part of a reading, next to the broken printer. I picked it up and realized there were letters were misprinted, dragging off the page and the pigment was lifting off, leaving an imprint on the table. I swept my hand across the page. Then I lay it on the bed of the scanner and pressed the button.

I was interested in the use of the printer as a producer of mechanical material—the replicator of an image—one who does not understand text as language or an image as a symbol, but just as rows of dispersed pixels organized in coordinates. The printer serves as a direct output of digitalized materials from human input; nothing printed can be modified from the original intent, unless it comes in contact with a different material. 

Enslaved to the will of digital files, the printer exerts its autonomy through mistakes. But its autonomy from human, its mistake in production, is also a weakness—it becomes vulnerable to the element of touch. And this accident made by the printer somehow allows human input into its given canvas.

Data crumbles into pigment. Touch dissolves language into tonal value. 

The scanner, another machine that exerts no opinion on content, then takes the modified piece of paper and brings it back to the realm of the digital. But this time, the scanner bed becomes a part of the composition. The piece of paper is realized in its nature as a three-dimensional object; no longer for its content necessarily, unless one reads it carefully—in which case, one might find a clue to the original piece pertaining to female genital mutilation.