Within my work I really focused on printing my body and using it as a material to print within the first term. How ever doing some research I decided to move away from printing my body and try and look at how us humans affect the earth, such as leaving marks on the planet, also the idea that we are constantly leaving marks even though some may not be visible to the human eye.
I decided to explore the concept thermal. I started to experiment around with hand sanitizer and receipt paper, I lathered my hands, feet, face, and really anything that had very dainty marks on with hand sanitizer. The hand sanitizer reacts with the warmth of your body to the receipt paper leaving an extremely detailed print that picks up so many individual marks. This is something I had done before accidentally and have always found it so interesting so I thought I would experiment around with it and push my knowledge further.
I did some research to find out what exactly happens when that heat is compressed onto the receipt paper. There is a chemical in receipt paper such as BPA (Bisphenol-A) this chemical helps dyes stick to the paper better to make printing more visible, it can also be found in cell phones, food cans, DVDs, eyeglass lenses etc. Also hand sanitizers contain alcohol and dermal penetration enhancers, they are designed to kill bacteria, microorganisms and enhance the delivery of active ingredients they contain. Most hand sanitizers contain a combination of isopropyl alcohol, ethanol or n-propanol with versions containing 60% to 95% alcohol, the higher the percentage the more effective the hand sanitizer.
I found out that the hand sanitizer reacts with the thermal paper, as the thermal paper contains BPA so the chemicals in hand sanitizer react with the paper to create these detailed marks due to the toxicity of the BPA and the hand sanitizer coming into contact with one another.
After doing further research I found out what I was doing with the thermal paper and hand sanitizer can be quite dangerous. Hand sanitizer speeds the absorption of BPA which is found in thermal receipt paper, anything we put onto our body is absorbed onto our bodies and then into our bodies. Repeated high exposures to BPA can lead to a range of conditions from liver abnormalities to heart attacks etc.
I also researched into human thermal heat, the body exchanges heat with the environment and then loses heat by diffusion and evaporation of body liquids. When humans average heat temperature is thirty seven degrees. Looking through a thermal camera on a humans body, the warmest parts are in red and the coldest parts are in blue. The hottest parts of the human body are chest, armpit, genitals, and head where as the coldest parts on the human body are hands, toes and feet. The reason why they are the coldest parts on our body is due to not as much blood gets pumped around to them.