osk + sxw re-structured the mock-up with Oana's sample papers from Montreal.
The Silkeborg paper museum is all that's left of what was once one of the first paper factories in northern Europe. The rest of the post-industrial riverside complex has been demolished or converted into luxury flats and a performing arts school that's about to go bankrupt. The paper museum is co-existing as a kind of 19th century adage to a newly built music and theatre venue. Their specialty is paper made from cotton with a series of artful watermarks. Bent, who was showing me around and teaching me something of the craft worked at the paper factory for 25 years and specialised in making complex moulds for watermarking. He still runs a business selling large cylindrical watermarking moulds for more industrial paper making complexes. paper process Here they soak and drain the (cotton) rags into a kind of thick cotton-wooly pulp then put it through a machine called a hollander which breaks it down, exposing the fibres. The amount of breaking down and the resultant thickness and length of the fibres is a bit part of what gives the paper its texture. Longer fibres, rougher texture. The fibres are the thing which binds the paper together too, so longer fibres mean you can have more luck binding other materials into the paper. As for what to bind into the paper... an artist was here a few days ago and she crushed a chair into woodchip, leather and foam and bound this into thick cotton paper. she planned to print an image of the original chair onto the paper. Bent also described a security company who wanted to blend RFID material into the paper. The chaotic pattern it would form when run through the paper-making process would make each sheet unique and therefore both potentially full of data and impossible to forge. I made some sheets of paper of varying roughness / fibre-length with whatever was lying around. I wanted to get a sense of how we could put copper wiring inside the paper - perhaps allowing us a more discreet way of creating paper speakers. Here are some pictures of the experiments before they dried (explanations in rollover text): The other key variable is how many times the paper is dipped in the solution - this gives us thickness. In the above examples the wire mesh paper has been dipped three times, the string / magnetic tape examples have been dipped twice. I've made all of these in triplicate so we can have sample copies in Copenhagen, Arizona and Montreal. IMPROVISING PAPER MAKING APPARATUS This is definitely do-able. To make a similar apparatus at home we'll need: A mould (any size, but probably A4). I can get this from the paper museum. A bathtub / similar for dipping. A means of drying the paper (a vacuum cleaner that can handle water will do) Fibrous material. This is the trickiest thing. We'll either need a hollander / similar machine to beat the pulp against two bluntish blades (difficult to source one of these) or we'll need pre-beaten material. I can get several sheets from Silkeborg to get us started, but we may want to find a solution closer to Copenhagen. TExture At Silkeborg they just use cotton for produciton. I was also shown an example of linen paper which was rougher to the touch and a bit closer to cloth in terms of texture. The linen paper also had a more particular rustling sound, more like banknotes than high quality writing paper.
Chalk is added to the paper (before the hollander stage) to give it greater opacity. Without chalk the paper is a lot more transparent especially when held up to the light. Newspaper is made from unprocessed woodchip. This is why it yellows and curls in the sun - There is still some acidic chemical from the tree inbetween the fibres which reacts to sunlight and eats the surrounding fibres. Paper used in books is processed to remove this acid. This process adds to the cost of the paper, which is why newspaper is so cheap. There are varying degrees to which this process is successful (again largely based on economics) which is some books are more susceptible to yellowing. It also explains why most paperbacks yellow if left exposed to sunlight on a windowsill. Bent also told me that paper was made illegal by the Catholic church for a couple of hundred years before the printing press. As something learnt from the arabs in Spain it was deemed infidel technology. Ironically the church (through monasteries) was also the biggest consumer of paper during this time. Crafty paper makers would add ochre to their paper to disguise it as parchment (which was permitted). This allowed them to produce much more than they would have if they only traded in labour-intensive parchment. |
Q is for quickenNotes from continuing trials. Archives
November 2014
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