Recently the idea was brought up by a colleague of mine, who also happens to be my roommate, relating to Brain Eno and his digital paintings. I was sent a link,
Brian Eno (14 Video Paintings)
http://www.ubu.com/film/eno_
77 million paintings
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
and yet my inquisitive nature stopped rather abruptly at the fact that what I saw was not paint, it was a video. Does a painting have to involve paint or the action of using paint these days? Who knows anymore? Still, we've been talking back and forth about printmaking being presented in a video or audio form, and my mind can hardly wrap around the idea.
First of all, what does a print sound like? If someone heard me carve wood or rub paper would they have the slightest idea as to what the noise was? How could a video document a print? I began to ponder photography and it's inherent similarities to printmaking tradition as I know it. I boiled my medium down to the simplest means, namely that it is a method of reproduction or transferring information. Prints essentially reflect content embedded in a surface. There are positives and negatives. One half is made for the other, and there is a balance represented in the impression given forth from one surface to the next. Is not photography the same, using value based matrices and light as a transferal medium onto a receptive substrate? Is not film then just an extension of that idea? But then a photo is not a movie, and a movie is surely not a print, and photos and prints may be one at times, but more often than not, they are separate as well. I search for a way to convey the print, other than the matrix or the substrate, and yet it eludes me. A video might only be documentation, and would not the final result of such a piece still involve the print, whatever form it might be?
What might the value be in a gesture truly removed from a print, where we might observe process, or hear the making of said work, and yet in the end our experience was outside of direct contact with the work? What would that metaphor be commenting about? If anything it might redirect our focus on this ever present tactile medium, despite the obsolescence it reflects, onto the new ways that prints renew their significance in our digital age.
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