Project by Maya Yildirim
The project explores the latent third dimension of the flatbed scanner by introducing unflat surfaces, three-dimensional objects, and vertical motion into a system premised on perfect contact and parallelism. When the flat surface of the scanning bed meets objects that resist full contact, the scanner becomes a site where depth is not only recorded but misread, distorted, and ambiguously translated. The work searches for the limits of legibility in this encounter, examining how three-dimensional form is compressed into a two-dimensional image and how flattening produces space as residue. Flatness is defined here as having no three-dimensional space, containing no depth, having no form. The condition of flatness is only apparent in the digital image produced by the scanning process; no object in the material world is fully flat, making the scanning bed an interface for 3D-to-2D translation. Colloquially flat objects (books, papers, journals) are described by this project as unflat, to argue that flattening is a process that requires an instrument (in this case the flat bed scanner), that transforms the material into a flat digital image. Tone becomes a primary register of depth, with light acting as the medium through which distance is measured. Drawing on the inverse-square law, the project treats tonal gradients as imperfect measurements of depth, revealing the instability of precision once light is translated into a compressed digital image.
