Exercise 002
Borders As Practice
ALFIE KOETTER AND EMMETT ZEIFMAN, MEDIUM OFFICE
A steady hand. A straight edge. ORTHO ON. With varying degrees of accuracy, there are more than a few ways to draw a straight line. Whether drawn by hand or with a vector-based software, straight lines eventually get scanned, exported, copied and reformatted, rasterized into a JPEG (or a TiFF, or a BMP, or a PNG, etc.) to be emailed or posted. Through this process of compression, information is lost (edge clarity is compromised), but also gained. The rasterized image ultimately reveals that these straight lines were never actually all that straight in the first place.
For this exercise, three apparently straight lines of different lengths (1/8”, 1/4” and 1/2”) were drawn, printed, scanned, rescaled to 1’ in length, rasterized at 72 ppi, traced, extruded, Boolean Intersect-ed, and physically modeled at 1/8”:1’, 1/4”:1’, and 1/2”:1’.
