Jon Schiereck's YouTube channel description is two words long: Shoots paper. The banner on his Ko-fi page reads "✨ Perforator goes brrrrr," and underneath it, one line: "Film is dead. We shoot paper!" What he has built is a 3D-printed perforator. A strip of photographic paper feeds through it; a pair of punches drops sprocket holes down both edges; the punches are driven up and down by a crank off a gear set, turned by hand or by a cordless drill; a rubber roller pulls the strip forward. The perforated strip goes into a 135 cassette, into any 35mm camera ever made, and afterwards into a darkroom tray. Jenny List wrote it up on Hackaday on September 11th and got the sentence exactly right: it's film, but it's not exactly film. He gives the files away through Ko-fi — not a file host, a tip jar. A 3D-printable slitter, for cutting sheet paper down to 35mm-wide ribbons, is in progress.

Start with what is already construct. In 1909 an international convention in Paris fixed 35mm as the global standard: four perforations per frame, the Bell & Howell perforation. The detail that matters is that perforations were originally round, and the shape was changed because round holes wore and deformed. Kodak introduced the larger KS perforation in 1924 — rectangular base, rounded corners — and stated the reasons plainly: steadiness, registration, durability, longevity. BH1866 became the standard for negative stock, KS1870 for release prints. Every one of those reasons points at the same fact: a strip of film passes through machinery over and over. A negative gets printed many times; a release print gets projected for years. A strip of darkroom paper is exposed once and developed once and never meets a projector in its life. The reason for the cut expired. The cut stayed in the standard. Schiereck ground two drill bits into punches, so what comes out of his machine is round holes — the very shape the standard severed in 1909 — and they run fine. He is not doing retro and he is not restoring anything. He is standing in a room that has been empty since the reason for the wall died and the wall did not. This is precisely what SAE means by remainder: not the piece the chisel threw away, but the unclaimed ground that stays open once the grounds for the cut have lapsed and the cut has not.

The second remainder is the paper. Someone in the Hackaday comments puts it with real expertise: paper makes a poor substrate for photographic negatives because its optical density is not uniform, so the results come out blotchy. That is entirely correct, and it is the whole point. Inside a system whose purpose is faithful rendering, uneven density is a defect, something to be engineered out. It is also the only part of the picture nobody authored — not the lens, not the subject, not the photographer. It is the paper's own biography: the distribution of pulp on a machine decades ago, suddenly measured by a beam of light. Two comments further down, the same thread is already naming it. One reader turns "blotchy images" into the title of a band's first album; another replies with two words — faux bokeh. Naming has begun, and as usual it has begun as a joke.

More to the point, this is not one man's quirk. A second person, Jackson Bohm — TheAlbinoGiraffe — posted a completely different 35mm perforator to Printables on January 10th. Its heart is a Neutaper film splicer, the sort of thing a cinema used to join prints with, which comes with a punch and die that cuts six pairs of perforations at a stroke. Around it he built a frame of 2040 aluminium extrusion, two NEMA 17 steppers, and the control board out of a dead 3D printer bought off Facebook. A hundred feet of stock takes about a thousand punch cycles and roughly three hours. His darkroom is four IKEA Lack tables stacked two by two in a closet with a leather skirt stapled around the top. His stock is a 610-foot roll of six-inch Fuji Crystal Archive glossy colour paper, forty dollars on eBay, slit down to 35mm by hand. Measured speed: ISO 8–10 outdoors, 1.5–2 indoors. The base is thick enough that only 24 exposures fit a cassette where some microfilm takes nearly 80. And then the colour: every frame carries a heavy cyan cast. He worked out why himself. Crystal Archive is engineered to cancel the orange mask of C-41 negative film. Load it straight into a camera and there is no orange mask in front of it, so the cancellation has nothing left to cancel. It stops being a correction and becomes a colour. That is about as clean a picture of a remainder as I have found: a compensation that has outlived the thing it compensated, and is therefore visible for the first time.

Why seeing this now matters more than seeing it later has a date attached. On April 1st, 2020, EMULSIVE — one of the largest film-photography sites there is — ran a product announcement: "Paper Blues," pre-rolled cyanotype paper in 35mm cassettes, three to a pack, three speeds at ISO 1.5, 5 and 12, thirty-five dollars, shipping in July. It was an April Fools joke. It worked because everyone knew the thing could not be done. And the wish is sitting right there in the comment thread of the joke: one reader, admitting he was taken in to the last line, writes that he still thinks there could be a way to make cyanotype 35mm "film," but that ISO 1 is too much of a dream. The editor replies that given the general disappointment, he feels they should make it just to make amends. Six years on, two men who have never met have each built the machine, and the number turns out not to be 1 but 8 to 10. The distance between a field's April Fools joke and its actual practice is one of the cleanest rulers for a remainder there is — and it has just been measured to zero by two guys with 3D printers.

One last thing worth recording. Bohm's build log no longer lives where he wrote it. His site is down, and he says why on the page: insufficient film sales to maintain hosting fees. The article now survives only as a block quote pasted into the bottom of a free 3D-model listing, its illustrations all pointing at the Internet Archive. The record of the remainder has itself become a remainder. There is also an Etsy shop linked from the same page. That is the shape of the window. The moment this gets a name — paper stock, a Lomography SKU, an "alt process" weekend workshop — the blotch becomes a preset, the cyan becomes a filter, and what is left is one more finished surface to admire. Right now it is still a man who ground two drill bits, and nobody has decided yet what it is.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics