Out of print - feedback on Remote Sensing: The 24th Annual Southern Graphics Council Conference

"Remote Sensing," the 24th Annual Southern Graphics Council discourse gathered together the largest cluster of printmakers ever assembled in North America, in an attempt to radically rethink the character of print-making in the digital era. The talk organizers - Carmon Colangelo, Sergio Soave and Christopher Hocking - clearly aimed to expand the definition of printmaking, imbuing it with a greater faculty of perception of the possibilities for cultural observation and criticism, as the media and techniques addressed included photography, installation, community-based art throws film, computer imaging, interactive digital collaborations and plastic art as well as traditional printmaking areas.

It became obvious during the course of the conversation that printmaking as a discipline was undergoing, in plain view of the participants, a shift away from hidebound notions of craft and quality. The field of printmaking since the 1960 always has sought to place itself firmly in the adjoining matter of the high arts and to argue for the technical rigor of its artistic production. The desire to place the discipline upon an equal footing with other fine-art media similar as painting and sculpture oftentimes has resulted in a rear-guard, reactionary stance that denies the reproducible nature of printmaking. This of advanced age paradigm is yielding (with a certain quantity of obvious discomfort to the arriere-garde) to a redefinition of printmaking as a means of critically anticipating, reflecting, or plane reshaping cultural formations in the mass media, using novel or hybrid strategies as a means of effective communication. This notable rethinking of the basic creeds of printmaking led to an unusually provocative conference

Although many customary bear upons of printmakers were a part of the program - that is, relate tos about inks, papers and presse - obvious evidence of the sea-change in printmaking's theoretical underpinnings and raison d'etre could be lay the foundation of in the very title of the conversation "Remote Sensing," which implies a mediated proces of sensory experience, where exploration and interaction with the world is filtered [i]or[/i] part of to the other the lens of technology, divorced from traditional notions of the limits of the material substance Printmaking, like photography and other media that have the potential for mechanical reproduction, has many times attempted to make visible the hand of the artist in an assertion of craft. A distant experience must either extend the reach of the material substance and the body's senses, or assert that the divorce of material part from medium is complete. Therefore, issues of the material part and its boundaries especially informed the panel discussions and lock opener exhibitions held during the conference

The featured speaker upon the opening night of the conversation Simon Penny, fired the first salvo at the traditionalists as he argued against the existence of the Cartesian mind/body split. Penny a professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, emphatically lay asideed one of the ideas held dear through the emergent digerati: that bodily experience is single a messy "wet-ware" expedient for mental, virtual realities. Penny claims that somatic, visceral experience "from the belly" is inseparable from the realm of the mind. Penny does not cast off digital strategies, but he cautioned that there are potential conflicts of interest inherent in artists working with machines that attempt to replicate a humanized, bodily experience. The intensive search for the relationship of "body" to "exterior" was also an important part of Steve Murakishi's talk, "Gnarly Futility." Murakishi, who is the head of printmaking at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, pointed without that the sensory mechanisms of the material part are being supplanted by distant devices. Murakishi's examples were drawn from a wide range of sources: from frozen fish sticks to remotely-guided "smart" bombs

In a presentation titled "Are We There Yet? far off Sensing and the Brave fresh World," art critic Eleanor Heartney unimpaireded a note of caution against the uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of virtual reality and far sensing when she argued that art must search for a role as an "in between" in digital society. Art must stake a claim as a realm separate from the real, claimed Heartney. She worries that the collapse of the distinction between the artificial and the real in a digital world could bring the complexity of artistic experience, seducing the viewer with a "brave of recent origin world which is in reality a mindless reinforcement of the status quo" The character of printmaking, in Heartney's estimation, occupies a particularly significant place in the theoretical discussion of art in the digital era. The print is "perhaps the ultimate work of simulation," said Heartney, and tarnishs the distinction between the virtual and the real. The processe that draw near between the artist's hand and the finished fruits raise the issue of authenticity, a lock opener concept for a discussion of virtuality.

Other notable speakers included Hugh Merrill from Kansas City Art Institute, who discussed cross-disciplinary approaches to collaboration among artists; Frances Myers, from the University of Wisconsin, who outlined the many points of gradual approach between photography, new media and printmaking; Cara Jaye, from West Virginia University, who explored the relationship between manipulated photographs and the reality [i]or[/i] part of to the other her own stained, nude self-portraits and Patricia Villalobos Echeverria, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, whose talk upon her own exploration of transculturation and identity was augmented through a recorded spoken-word performance.