Letterpress Studio
A green cast-iron press, a stack of cotton paper and afternoon sun through the factory windows. The flywheel turns; you can turn it too.
A turning wheel
The press’s flywheel turns slowly, its spokes passing any one spot less than twice a second even at the fastest pace. Nothing flashes. Sound plays only if you start with it.
What you can do here
- Spin the flywheel
- Press on the wheel’s rim or spokes and drag round, the way you would turn it by hand. Let go while you’re moving and it keeps going, then slows back to its own pace, because a flywheel is heavy and doesn’t like to change speed. It won’t go faster than about a third of a turn a second, however hard you spin it.
- Pull the handle
- Tap the wooden handle on the right, press Pull the handle, or P. You hear the platen close, and the wheel gets a push and then coasts back to its pace.
- Set the pace
- Pace sets how fast the wheel turns on its own, from standing still to about a third of a turn a second. The press’s mechanism gets louder as it speeds up.
- Follow the rim
- Move along the edge of the wheel and a warm light follows your pointer round the iron.
Use it as your wallpaper
Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.
Live link
https://whitescreen.tv/interactive-wallpapers/letterpress-studio/#wallpaper- On a computer desktop
- Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.
- On a TV or a spare screen
- Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.
- On a phone or tablet
- Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.
A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.
What the flywheel is for
On a platen press like this one, the flywheel stores the work of your foot on the treadle, or of a belt from a motor, and gives it back steadily. Its weight carries the press through the moment the platen squeezes the paper against the type, so the printer’s rhythm doesn’t stall on every impression.
How the wheel turns here
The wheel is the one in the photograph. Its spokes and hub were unwrapped into a flat disc and the light from the window taken out of them, so the iron can turn while the sunlit side stays toward the window. The wall and floor behind the spokes were filled in from what shows between them.
About the sounds
Three recordings: the quiet run of the press’s mechanism, one stroke of the platen, and the air of a quiet room. The stroke waits seven seconds between plays, about the pace of feeding sheets by hand.
If you’d rather just watch
Picture and sounds generated from our prompts. Motion, controls and mix by WhiteScreen.tv.
