I've Got my Eye on You

The wonderful thing that you can do with a scanner, its uniquely mesmerising ability, is: warp.

Take me, for example, a normal woman with normal-shaped eyes. I can drag my face along the scanner, following the beam of light, and turn my eyes into long shadows. The result is a moderately spooky image.

This is the true joy of making an image via some progressive means. Panorama modes on phones can do pretty interesting things too, but the scanner is so much more controllable. It sits still, and you have to move. This means that you can effect a sort of theatrical, slow dance with the scanner. The glass and the line of light create a tiny stage for you.

The rapid blurring and dimming of any element of your scanned object that isn't directly touching the glass really adds to the startling sense of wrongness that can occur. It's not just the weird segmenting of the image as the scanner-beam moves across the glass that makes for a gorgeously distorted image, but also the fact that the beautiful clarity a scan can offer only goes so far when you're scanning something 3D.

It gives the arresting effect of emerging from the darkness. The world is so narrow. The shadow is so thick. Here I am - looking in.