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Clever Artist Uses Pasta Maker to Create Duplicate Collages From a Single Photo

By Kelly Richman-Abdou on April 4, 2018

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Avant-garde artist and self-described “alchemist” Kensuke Koike crafts collages with a surrealist twist. Rather than use a simple pair of scissors or a tried-and-true X-acto knife, Koike often creates his pieced-together works with an unconventional tool: a hand-cranked pasta maker. For his latest magic trick, Koike uses the machine to perplexingly produce duplicate copies of a single dog portrait.

So, how does he do it? Koike first inserts the photograph into the mechanical pasta maker, which cuts it into a series of uniform strips. He then sorts every other piece into one of two groupings, culminating in a pair of nearly identical images. Koike repeats the process with these new twin portraits, rotating their orientation as he puts them into the machine. Using the same strategy, Koike rearranges the strips, and—voila! He has turned a single picture into four photographs

In order to showcase the ins-and-outs of his creative collage trick, Koike filmed his artistic process. In addition to serving as a quirky performance art piece, the short video proves that there's “nothing added, nothing removed,” and no hocus pocus involved.