Yiming Sun
Speed = Distance/Time
Ⅰ
2024-2025
Installation and Artist book
Material: mirror acrylic, metal, thermal paper, candles, wood
2024-2025
Installation and Artist book
Material: mirror acrylic, metal, thermal paper, candles, wood
Since September 2024, I have been collecting receipts from supermarkets, restaurants and stations in London. Without exception, these receipts are made of thermal paper. Although very few people now have the habit of keeping their receipts, most placed still provide them to customers, even though they are likely to be discarded the very next moment.
Thermal printing is fast and inexpensive, but the print is also prone to fading.
Yet people seem to forget them even faster than they fade away.
Thermal printing is fast and inexpensive, but the print is also prone to fading.
Yet people seem to forget them even faster than they fade away.
Speed = Distance/TimeⅠ attempts to capture how time and space affect the presentation of images, and how they change the experience of reading.
This project explores the process of heating a book. Before the heating begins, the book is almost blank. Its existence has no inscribed meaning. It’s only when time passes and the temperature gradually rises that content is transferred to the pages.
It slows down the process of thermal inscription and visualizes printing speed through the heating of the candle. The purpose of deliberately slowing down the printing speed on thermal paper questions the nature of how thermal paper is traditionally used, for the rapid imaging of receipts. What does the loss of the fast-developing on the surface of thermal paper challenge?
This project has explored the use of thermal paper as a material. It engages with the inherent physical and chemical properties of thermal paper in order to study its materiality. This is performed through exploring the relationship between the degree of discoloration of the thermal paper’s surface and heating time, heating area, and the distance from the heat source. As the heat source - the candle continues to emit heat, the pages of the thermal book gradually turn black, and the temperature of the candle, leaves black traces on the increasingly thicker and more numerous pages of the book. It visualizes the time and speed through distance.
The book, opens in the center and turns upside down on a special book holder. Readers can read the traces from the mirror without turning the book over. Reading through the mirror reverses the reading mode, traditionally a book is read by holding it in between ones hands. This device wished to create an alternative experience making an unfamiliar sensation. Designing this unfamiliar reading experience provokes a rethinking of the familiar - the form of the traditional book and the properties of fast thermal imaging.
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