Pixiq

When I taught kids photography, we'd often start with photograms since you didn't need a camera and you could get an original print done quickly.

The photogram is what you get if you put a bunch of flat stuff with various opacity (usually the most interesting) on a sheet of light sensitive paper, put a sheet of glass over the stuff to hold it down, shine a light from above for some fraction of time, and then put the paper through the three chemicals: developer, short stop, fixer, and wash. 

But if you don't have a darkroom, you can do similar creative work with a flatbed scanner.  What I do is put a sheet of glass ontop of the scanner glass to protect it (I can put anything I like on the glass including a small amount of liquid, without it running into the scanner) - and then pull the cover forward, or make a cover from cloth, or cardboard, and keep the lights off, and scan the stuff.

I don't know if there is an actual word for this sort of art, but I can tell you that kids enjoy it, maybe not as much as watching the image appear in developer, but you can then put the image into photoshop, reverse the luminosity, and you have something that can be just as creative or interesting as the old photograms.

And, there's one thing you can do with the scanogram that you couldn't do with the photogram, at least not easily.  You can move the object on the glass, and time it to go faster or slower than the moving light.  Try ahead of time to imagine what will happen if you move the object along with the moving light?  What if you move it faster?  Slower?

The gallery has a few examples that I did when things were slow and I was looking for something new to futz around with.