The tickets are all different shapes and sizes, and are marked or "validated" in various ways. Some machines punch holes in tickets, others print the date and time the ticket was used, others leave an invisible mark on a magnetic strip on the card. Whenever I came across a machine which made interesting marks on tickets, I tried to use it to make a mark in my travel journal. While some train tickets are beautifully designed, very little thought has gone into others. In all, the punched ticket serves to reminds one of the place it comes from.

The Ticket Puncher explores this property of train tickets. I experimented with using solenoids to punch holes in the paper, and using various mechanisms to print ink on the paper. I wanted to develop a mechanism which would allow the person whose ticket was being stamped to have some control over the visual forms that appeared on it.

I constructed a machine with a slot on top in which one can place a ticket. Once the ticket is in the machine, two wheels rotate the ticket while an ink-jet print head marks it. One can create different patterns on the ticket by grabbing and rotating the ticket during the printing process. An image which would be uninteresting when printed on a static piece of paper becomes much more interesting when printed onto rotating paper. In one sense it is a computational form, though the computation is performed by the physical act of rotating the ticket during the printing process.