my notes after week 1:

Thoughts that I am having …

• i think that one thing i have to unlearn/change my perspective on from the first week is that risograph should be a system that i am observing rather than cute textures/colours that i am decorating with …
• zooming in to my anccco copy, the most intruiging thing for me are the mesh patterns formed by overlapping dots of colours

• i still dont exactly 10000% understand the mechanics of risograph (dots) so maybe i should start here ……

As part of my iterations, I began experimenting with halftoning.

I was initially excited by the logic of it, the way continuous tone gets translated into dots. It felt appropriate for Riso. While testing, I chose fluorescent pink as one of the colours. There was something about it that felt inherently Riso — hyper-saturated, slightly abrasive, unapologetically artificial. It didn’t feel like a “natural” pink; it felt industrial and specific to the machine. That specificity drew me in.

But the more I worked with it, the more I realised the outcome felt too controlled. My tutor group echoed this sentiment. The dot patterns were precise. Predictable. Even when scaled or adjusted, they still carried a kind of digital cleanliness where I could anticipate the result before printing it.

It started to feel like I was simulating texture rather than generating it.

That frustration pushed me to pivot toward dithering instead. The texture immediately felt different — less polished, more unstable. Where halftone dots create smooth tonal gradients, dithering breaks tone into harsher binary decisions. It introduces visual noise. It refuses subtlety, and it is the riso’s native algorithm.

From there, I began printing and scanning repeatedly. Each scan degraded the image slightly — introducing dust, compression artefacts, tonal shifts. What started as a flat digital file slowly accumulated physical residue. The process became less about perfect reproduction and more about erosion.

This is where I began to sense a critical enquiry forming.

… what happens when you keep photocopying a photocopy?