Some random ideas
I dug up a thermal ticket printer from a past project and started playing with it — the idea was to mess around with agentic coding and create a simple ownership labeling app. It quickly escalated.
With agent-assisted coding I could prototype fast, and somewhere along the way I got hooked on the thermal printer aesthetic: black on white, raw statistics burned onto paper with no gradients, no shades.
That led to some very early and rough ideas:
Good News Everyone — Two or more printers spitting out news in real time, sorted by sentiment: good or bad. Will the pile of bad news exceed the pile of good news or not? A nod to Professor Farnsworth.
Gender-based Violence — A printer that outputs fictional victim profiles at random intervals, based on real statistics on gender-based violence. Each time you hear the printer, something happened. Numbers/statistics become individuals.
An inconvenient receipt — You press a button, receive a supermarket-style receipt. Instead of prices, it shows other numbers. For example: the animal suffering it caused (real numbers, real sources); unacceptable human labour circumstances; carbon footprint; … Then you vote by putting your receipt on one of two piles: “fine by me” or “not okay.” The stacks of receipts in the boxes form a visible referendum.
Receipt of War — One ticket per day with what happened, casualties, cost, etc., live data.
Black over White — Several printers in series with the same paper roll, printing on top of each other: at the bottom a cry for help, then policy, money, media, first world problems — until the original voice is unreadable. Once overprinted, it’s overprinted. The softest voices disappear first.
Ownership & Sharing — A public label printer that allows anyone to print ownership labels, but gives you a choice: this is my stuff alone / my stuff but I’ll share it / give this item to the commons. We have too much stuff already!
Complimentator — Press a button, print a compliment. Give it to someone. Giving a compliment isn’t always easy; a slip of paper lowers the barrier.
Fortune Not-Cookie — Fortune cookie without the cookie. Deconstructed: separate bowl for the cookie, the wrapper, and the fortune. Or: “allow cookies?” Fortunes generated with live data — weather, time, state of the world. Or the other way around: bad fortune?
Route Planner — Prints the full route to Compostela, instruction by instruction, turn by turn. On an endless roll. In realtime like if a person is currently walking it.
Music Seismograph — A microphone listens to music, the printer draws the sound as a seismograph. Continuous, on a roll. A physical record of what was played.
Most of these ideas circle around the same thing: making data tangible. Statistics are abstract, paper is not. A stack of receipts has weight. A roll from ceiling to floor takes up space. The printer rattles, and that rattling is part of the work too.
Is this a hobby? Could this be art? I don’t know yet, but I kinda find calling it the latter pretty cool. What do you think?