Since we have access to our new studio space in Berlin, our neighbour Malte, an amazing print maker and collector of the odd, knowing our passion for digital and analog interactions, pulled from one of his boxes an old receipt printer. He didn’t choose it by chance, he knew about the one I keep at home, which is connected to my website.

As we started testing it to see if it was working, we printed the most recent images saved on my computer: a series of 48 A4 sheets that together form a large scale poster.

Whereas the first experiment simply rescaled A4s to the width of receipt paper, Fidel suggested making use of the aesthetics and format of the roll itself, with its long continuous stripes. We started writing a few Python scripts to split, or tessellate, an image into a series of stripes matching traditional DIN formats. With the technical limitations in terms of resolution and monochromatic output, we implemented dithering, halftones and thresholds effects.

Every print gave us new ideas. So we continued to add parameters to allow for horizontal or diagonal layouts or to specify custom formats and dimensions. When the list of parameters became too long to practically handle on the command line we built a custom web interface to generate image strips and send directly to the printer.

We exhausted our stock of receipt paper.