Making something pretty from old slides
November 13, 2013 3:39 PM   Subscribe

I need ideas for an art project using old 35mm slides. I have looked at the lampshades and curtains. The problem is most of my slides are a black background with very fine colored lines forming the image (they're protein structures, this picture here is a good example of what's on my slides). I worry any lampshade I formed with these wouldn't highlight the images on the slides the way I see in photos because so much of the slide itself is opaque.

It seems to me anyone looking at the lampshade would mainly see the light in between the slides and not so much the images. The structures on the slides are very beautiful and I would love to find a classy way to display these. Does anyone have ideas? There are a LOT of slides--at least 500.

Also, I have negative artistic and crafting abilities so anything I do would have to be extremely simple.

Artists, halp me please?
posted by anonymous to Media & Arts (4 answers total)
 
Projecting them onto a blank wall and photographing them often comes up with some lovely results. I've got great prints that way just using a cell phone camera. You'll need to get hold of an old projector though. Freecycle can often provide. Get creative and angle the projector to the wall so you get distorted images. All sorts of fun to be had.
posted by merocet at 3:50 PM on November 13, 2013


Project the slides onto the interior of a lampshade. Each slide will need a point source, bright, non-diffused led of its own to behave as its combined projector bulb/lens. You might need to make a little cone of black paper around the LED if it spills to much light around the sides.

Not all the LEDs have to be on at the same time. You might not even need a lampshade: just put it on the walls, as suggested earlier.
posted by the Real Dan at 4:58 PM on November 13, 2013


I think you could still make that lampshade, you'll just have to move where you attach them to each other a bit so that the slides overlap each other, like scales on a fish.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 5:49 PM on November 13, 2013


I second that you can make a lampshade and I think it would look really cool! I'd even experiment with letting light leak at the edges, so that your lampshade would have basically the outlines of the slides with light peeking through and then you would look and the dark squares and see the delicate images. The primary colors would likely be vivid enough for it to not just look like a bunch of black slides. Basically slides, when not projected, are looked at on light tables. A lampshade is basically a conical light table. SO maybe using a flat white lampshade and attaching the slides to that would disperse the light more desirably like a light table than if you made the lampshade out of slides only with no underlying material. But really I think both ways would look cool!

The best thing to do is take a few and experiment with how you will connect / mount them on a lampshade them before you commit to how you will do it. Also, if you don't have an existing light source for a lamp - look for one where the light source is as large and diffuse as possible (ie one that will mimic the look of a light table as opposed to, for instance, using one of the new thin squiggly tube light bulbs - those would be the worst).

A curtain would also look cool, and you could easily test it by just linking a square of 9 together and see how it looks when you put a light source (ie a window) behind it.
posted by smartypantz at 9:27 PM on November 13, 2013


« Older Sweater Obsession   |   Flash! Aa-aaa-a! Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.