Xavier Antin

I was looking on the internet today to kill some time and I came across a project by the artist Xavier Antin. Here is his website.

You can probably guess from the picture above what is going on. This is titled ‘Just in Time’ and it’s a series of 4 printers from different generations each printing a single colour for a book. The first printer in the chain is a stencil duplicator and it’s in charge of magenta, second it’s a spirit duplicator that prints cyan, third is a laser printer that does the black and lastly it’s an inkjet printer that prints the yellow. I just thought this was a really cool and quirky idea. It reminded me of those Rube Goldberg machines where one thing triggers the next and you end up with a super complicated way of doing a simple task. The book which is printed out of this crazy machine is a series of pictures taken of factories and assembly lines which is pretty fitting.

I really like the way each book will be different because the paper wont always feed into each printer the same way. It makes each book unique. I’m usually a stickler for things being really neat and if I print something and it isn’t perfect that I’ll have to do it again, but for some reason I could live with this, I think it’s because I know exactly what has gone into making each picture rather than it coming magically out of one machine.

Hopefully you enjoyed this as much as I did!

Charlie CT

P.s. also check out some of the other work this artist has done, there is some stuff similar to this which is also pretty cool.