“FRAME_01 / establishing the acetate lenses”
Tonight I began building the first acetate “lenses” for the visual side of signal // NOISE and process zine.
Rather than clean overlays or digital templates, each sheet starts life by being shown full-screen on the iMac, mirrored into the smallest CRT in the glitch-lab, and photographed directly off the phosphor. That’s where the project’s visual logic begins: a digital field rewritten by analogue drift.
Each printed acetate sheet then becomes a switchable lens — used in two ways:
Shot through on the Chinon 35mm, letting the acetate act as an optical filter: a physical veil between subject and camera, carrying its own distortions, scratches, and code.
Projected onto scenes and objects using the overhead projector, so the acetate becomes a moving surface of interference layered onto real space before the shutter even fires.
Either way, these CRT-born frames fuse with the subject matter. They add codification, misalignment, grain, curvature, and the quiet visual equivalent of mishearing.
The first sheet carries a simple identifier (PZ_FRAME_01) and the project’s working thesis:
NO FRAME IS ORIGINAL / EVERY IMAGE IS A MISHEARING
Once printed onto acetate, these will be altered across time: white paint, smeared ink, dust, abrasion, toner scratched back to raw transparency — each mark accumulating like generational noise. Each sheet will degrade, mutate, and misremember.
The acetates become both lens and subject, both signal and interference, both instruction and error.