You hear an awful lot these days about doom scrolling, and perhaps you get sucked into that miserable vortex from time to time as we all seemingly do, but what about comfort scrolling? You know, searching out and enjoying web content that is interesting, informative, and also, in some way, comforting. I happened upon one such item the other day, an article about using advanced X-ray imaging and computational techniques to study the historical practice of letter locking, an early form of encryption. I went to the original scientific paper that was published in the journal Nature Communications to take a deeper dive... I decided to have some fun and try out one of the lock folds myself. I started with the most transparent paper I could find in the studio, a thin sheet of Kozu printmaking paper, and folded it according to one of the examples in the article. I then placed it on a light box and made the image above. I think I might play around a little more with this concept. And, if it doesn't pan out, perhaps I'll post one of my experiments in the mail to a friend. Who knows, getting an old school letter in the mail might actually be comforting to them.
