This idea was inspired by my experience of washing papers left in my pants pockets, which I used to do all the time when I was younger. Sometimes I could salvage the papers and they would come out mostly untouched and sometimes they’d look like a melted vax version of whatever I’d originally put on it. So the very beginning of my idea was using paper (and the image upon it) as my signal and medium. I decided I couldn’t just run papers through a washing machine a bunch, because of all the potential water usage, so I decided to use a crockpot. With a total of about 80 ounces of water (I had to refill several times) and half a bowl of coffee and lemon juice each (to alter the colors further, although I’m not sure it had any effect) I took 17 x 11 inch sheets (from an old issue of The Economist) and repeatedly folded them into 4ths, layered them, steamed them within the crockpot for 8 minutes, and then unfolded and dried them before repeating the process. This started with the cover and I managed to get through about 20 sheets before the inner layers began completely breaking down. Each iteration had 3 layers – the sheet or sheets previously steamed, and a layer on each side of the central one that was a unsteamed sheet from the Economist. The unfolding and folding process ensured that it wasn’t just a giant stack of paper stuck together – by spontaneously and randomly damaging the sheets, introducing rips and tears, I was able to produce some funky looking sheets that as I went further and further on, deviated very much from their original rectangular shape. The end results are probably not too surprising, but nontheless by the 20th iteration, very little of the original sheet was left (a lot of chunks of paper just fell off).

Links:

Before the 1st iteration:

https://ibb.co/m9i4ee

After each iteration:

https://ibb.co/eU6CXz

What folding looks like:

https://ibb.co/cKTRsz

5th iteration:

https://ibb.co/jRAHze

15th iteration:

https://ibb.co/mj6CXz

20th iteration

https://ibb.co/deX85K