Print Stuff In Guido's Room

Yesterday Guido Tamino started his project Print Stuff. Tamino has installed a printer in his room and enables people from all over the world to print stuff over the Internet. Everyone is invited to submit a short note together with a drawing or picture via a fully automated web form. After hitting ‘print’, a clean sheet of paper enters the printer and falls down on the floor in Tamino’s room with your personal message on it. A webcam streams the printer’s activity, so we can actually see the printing process online.

Tamino is planning to make a book with all received prints. On his website he shares “some stuff that people are printing in my room”. Besides images of babies (who does that?) and lame pictures of rainbows, some interesting footage for the book has been already printed. What to think of a picture of Roger Federer? It all summarizes Tamino’s fascination and the reason he started this project. “Looking at my printer sending out some stuff picked by strangers on the Internet becomes addictive in a short time. There is some mistery behind that, which is exciting and makes the printing process an extremely pleasant thing to look at, because you never know what to expect.”

Read more about the project on Tamino’s blog. For the geeks among us: the (amazing) Creative Applications magazine shares some technical information about the Print Stuff project:

“The process uses a shell script for printing and uploading part, PHP for the general queue handling (together with a PDF class for formatting everything right) and a simple Pure Data patch for snapping webcam pictures and uploading them to the server.”