Mixed media artist Bruno Levy was playing around with his scanner when he discovered something surprising. Image: Bruno Levy Different movements yielded different results. Image: Bruno Levy Somewhere between physical stuff and digital distortion. Image: Bruno Levy The lines could be erratic or perfectly straight. Image: Bruno Levy The resulting scans could be dark or light. Image: Bruno Levy Here: a close-up of one of the saran wrap scans. Image: Bruno Levy Aluminum foil yielded great results too. Image: Bruno Levy At first, Levy was just fascinated by the topography of a static sheet of crumpled foil. Image: Bruno Levy But with a little mid-scan movement, they take on another quality entirely. Image: Bruno Levy

Digitizing your old snapshots with a scanner is smart. Pressing your butt up against a scanner is funny. Putting random stuff from your kitchen in a scanner and wiggling it around may not make a whole lot of sense, but as it turns out, it ends up looking pretty incredible.

Mixed media artist Bruno Levy discovered the effect when he was working on a series of videos, using his flatbed scanner as a sort of stop motion camera. First he scanned his hand, which was neat, if not revelatory. But it made him notice something. When he moved his appendage mid-scan, the final image took on all sorts of strange distortions and colorizations. He rooted around his house for more materials to experiment with, ultimately leading him to the kitchen. "When I scanned the aluminum, I loved the landscapes that formed," he says. "The variations seemed quite infinite."

The topographies of the aluminum foil were compelling on their own–tiny little metallic moonscapes of peaks and craters. But when Levy introduced movement the results were even more striking. The scans that emerged occupy some strange liminal space, one foot still in the material world but well on their way to full-on digital distortion. He tried the same thing with polyvinylidene chloride, better known as saran wrap, and the results were even wilder.

Even more exciting, to Levy, was the fact that no two looked alike. "I found that moving them at different speeds could create completely different compositions," he explains. "If I moved the materials very fast I could create thin lines. If I dragged it slowly across the scanner I could create long streaks of colors, and if I spun it from a constant point I could form circles."

In essence, the simple process let Levy paint his own distortions. It's a physical, tangible means to a glitched-out digital end. And in terms of the supplies required, the whole thing was fantastically economical. "I was able to create hundreds of variations with one material," Levy points out. "That was extremely exciting to me."

Hat tip: Triangulation