PRINTER AB0D

AB0D · 1/1

A printer that prints with blood. Thin vertical bars cross the painted field and never stop. Two jobs only, and they are opposite. The ones that lay carry the nozzle plate on their trailing edge and leave a band of blood behind them, one row per nozzle. The ones that take away carry the blade and leave the clean behind them. The painting is whatever survives between the two.

Nothing here is recorded. Every frame is computed while you watch it. The ground is desktop geometry pulled to the size of a canvas and worked with a squeegee. The blood is held as quantity and wetness: fresh, it is scarlet and it mirrors, so the raking light fires off it; dry, it goes brown and then almost black, it stops shining and it cracks. Only the wet can still be dragged. One light, raking, the same one in every work of mine.

Nozzles clog and clear on their own, so the bands carry white slits that are never in the same place twice. What is laid is still liquid and runs: the drips fall from the bottom edge of the band, slow down as the blood sets, and stop with one heavy drop at the tip. Then a blade comes across and takes them away.

The machine breathes. Sometimes it floods, the printing bars run and the blades can no longer keep up, and the field fills with blood until there is almost nothing else. Sometimes the blades take over and the painting comes back out from underneath. It never repeats and it never settles.

P prints. Not a screenshot of the screen: a new work, generated on the spot, made only of blood dashes on paper, four thousand pixels square, with a white passepartout and the signature with the date and the hour it was pulled. Each press gives a different one, and the series is deterministic: print number three of this machine will always be that print.

M turns the sound off and on. The noise is not a recording either, it is the machine itself: each bar has its own voice, the stepper whine rises with speed, the blades scrape low, and every end of travel is a mechanical click and a paper step.