I work in a world bereft of imagination. Every day I suffer trial by numbers and projects and strategies. Through it all I crave a little colour in my working life, some wit and ingenuity, and some pizzazz.
It is hence with some disappointment that I pick up my print-outs from the colour printer
in my office. Each and every one is a faithful representation of the dreary material I see on my computer screen. The brochure for the machine no doubt calls it “the state of the art” but I rarely receive anything even resembling art from it.
I propose a colour printer with some sort of inbuilt artificial intelligence or better some artificial creativity that would allow it to ‘interpret’ my print requests in its own style.
I want a printer who’s medium is light. I don’t want a bar graph of sales, I want a baroque graph of sales. I want a surrealist interpretation of my presentation slides - and a duck hitting a computer with a hammer does not constitute surrealism in my world. But more than this, I want a colour printer with a flair for nudes.
There may be risks. I don’t want to find that it needs its muse before it will print for me. I don’t want it to cut off a sprocket after an argument with the coffee machine about shadows. And I don’t want it trying to hang itself every time the toner runs out.
Nonetheless, I have no doubt that if my colour printer were only able to express itself a little more freely, my working day would pass that much quicker.