Recording The Exposure?

What if I stop caring so much about the detail in my prints? I could make my work a lot more about the passage of time and the chemical reactions by documenting the reactions happening during the breakdown of the organic material. I just wouldn't be able to re-register everything exactly. But I should be able to get fairly close to registering everything, and that might still work.

Basically, if I don't concern myself with perfect detail, I can take a print that's exposing for (say) two days. And during that two day exposure, I could make four scans of it, showing the actual exposure process. Then, when it's done, I can make another scan of the "final" exposure. And then continue to scan the print as it decays, after the organic material has finished desiccating.

In this print (above), I scanned the image after a short exposure, then loaded it back into the frame just to see what would happen. I had no expectations of getting a good image, so I just figured "what the hell?" and let it go. And I got something amazing. So I seriously regret is the huge jump between the first scan and the second. There's so much interesting stuff happening that I missed!! And that, I think, could be really important to include. Maybe even the artifacts of disassembly, scanning and re-assembly can become part of the work? They'll reflect the process in the final product. But the product will actually be the compiled and (somehow) displayed collection of scans. Not the blackened paper at the end of the silver decay.

Yes? Maybe!