Pebeliths

John Providenza and I cooked up a backwards way to use a darkroom enlarger to make art prints from a home computer. The name combines syllables from the computer name, PB-1, and a printing process, lithography.

We installed the PB-1 computer in John's darkroom with its monitor facing up toward the enlarger's lens.

We placed small slices of printing paper in the negative carrier where it could be exposed from the monitor's light following the reverse path from usual printing.

We used this setup to photograph random mazes generated by a variation of my earlier Maze program, this one paying special attention to weighting random probabilities for artistic effect.

We made several dozen very small images, each one irreplaceably unique. We split these between ourselves and then disassembled the equipment.

Although we used a photographic process, there were no negatives involved. We felt that this added a sense of perfection that was difficult to achieve with traditional photography were there was always the possibility of making a better print.

See also Proper Mazes