Olin to Set World Record!

It’s been almost a week since my friend Oren and I e-mailed our plea to all students: Please save your one-sided print jobs; we want to put them to good use! We plan to break a world record – that of the largest ‘rasterbated’ image – for an Expo project. Preparation work is nearing its conclusion. Paper collection aside, all we need to do is to scrape our team of paper caper tapers together in order to assemble our masterpiece in the week before Expo.

Rasterbation (also known as tiled printing) is the creation of one gigantic printed image out of many carefully assembled regular-sized pages. Presently, the largest specimen in the world is made of a measly 1500 sheets of 11×14 paper and covers only 150 square meters.

On the other hand, our image will be made of over 3000 securely Scotch taped 8.5×11 pages and will cover almost 200 square meters. Weather permitting, it will hang outside a building. Otherwise, we can drape it over the entire auditorium. In accordance with Guinness official guidelines, we will record video evidence of the mosaic’s construction, the finished piece, and the taking of official final measurements (in both imperial and metric).

One final hurdle still remains. As of yet, we have not picked an image to blow up and print. For our world record attempt to rocket the name of Olin College to kitchens and water coolers across America (and the world!) we need an image that is flashy. We need an image that is emblematic. We need an image that is a single image, or many contiguous thematically linked images, according to Guinness official guidelines. If you have an idea that fits the bill, please let us know. It might get you fame and eternal glory!

Let’s make this one for the books. Olin may not be the tallest, fastest, or have the largest collection of Barbie dolls, but I guarantee that if you travel the world, you won’t find a single group with more tiled-printing-related creative spirit than us!

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