More DIY high tech printers

Adding to my collection of website stories about people's great DIY printers - here is a link to one prints images on toast.

In addition to their sublimely ridiculous toast printer, the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory website also has a posting about a sugar printer which they built for about $500 which prints 3D objects. The printer's creators were inspired by a show of Rachel Whiteread at the Tate Modern - and enormous installation of white cast boxes, which resemble sugar cubes. The Tate's website has a great video of the installation being created in time lapse video. Whiteread has often come up in curatorial discussions at Philagrafika as an artist who works with multiples and works from a variety of matrices, for example her watertower project.

Here is the toast being printed:

So, I wanted to invite anyone who might be interested to come to my little side project at Space 1026 next week. It is an exhibition about collaborative printmaking.

Space 1026 is located at 1026 Arch Street featuring several different makes and models of print collaboration with projects by local and national artists.

Cannonball Press and Howling Print Studios are brewing up a highly caffeinated, giant relief print mash up, served strong and black, of course. Cannonball Press is the gnarly, but lovable print dudes from Brooklyn, New York--Martin Mazorra and Mike Houston, who crank out more prints than you can shake a stick at. Their co-hort, and partner in crime, Dennis McNett of Howling Print Studios, also of Brooklyn infamy.

And in the opposite corner, facing off against the stark black world of Cannonball and Howling Print will be the tie dye musings of hippie love, featuring an evolving oversize screenprint featuring image casualties from the summer of love, what printer, O. Roman Hasiuk has been describing as "a dynamic collaborative print. It's an organic, process oriented, ongoing large-scale screenprint that features the imagery of many different artists, with no set beginning or determined end." Lucky gallery visitors will be treated to impromptu ink slinging sessions in October by Hasiuk using screenprint printing and his forearms of steel.

Next, a Broadside Battle will be raging on the big wall in the gallery! This "battle" is an open competition for printmakers and artists, featuring single sheet printed matter. The battle promoters are expecting a slew of gig posters, public notices, wanted posters and more. That's when the competition begins...a "printoff," sort of like the NFL playoffs, but no pads or mouth-guards required. Each week the best printed matter (determined by a rag-tag team of judges) will advance until a winner is declared. That lucky winner will receive all of the prints as their prize!

And, Drive By Press will be cranking out the prints, in the gutter outside Space 1026 on Friday night, and Saturday, too. Drive By Press is a traveling print shop housed in the back of a pickup truck based in Wisconsin. Drive By printers Gregory Nanney and Joseph Velazquez will be stopping in Philadelphia on their east coast tour. They bring printing to the streets with their very own brand of print pulling action!

Hope you can make it out!

The Digital Debate
Post by Cindi Ettinger of C.R. Ettinger Studios

As I peruse the Art Fairs, and art magazines, I see more and more "digital"
art available through art organizations. Often they are nothing more than
scanned images or reproductions. They're misrepresented and called original
prints and are often used for fundraisers as well as being sold as fine art
prints. They are signed and numbered.

There are many digital prints out there that are created in the computer
with great skill by the artist. Yet, there is no differentiation between
those "works of art" and a copy such as a scanned drawing or painting. It is
high time for a discussion to eliminate this confusion. People need to be
aware that there is a difference and they should know what it is that
they're buying. It is particularly confusing when these "copies" are
available through museums and advertised in art magazines such as Art On
Paper as "original prints." Historically, with every advent of new
technology, which usually involves a photo process, these issues have to be
readdressed. So now with the digital age in full swing it's time to clear up
this confusion.

- - - - -

Interested in the digital debate?

Read Martha Schwendener's article "Even in the Digital Age, a Strong Case for Printmaking" from February 12, 2007.

7/7/08 Update, just found another printmaker positing similar questions on the blog post: Are We Witnessing the End of Fine Art Printmaking?

The field of print faces challenges from being banned from Art Fairs, to academic print departments abandoning traditional shops for digital printers. The New York Times recent article, Even in the Digital Age, a Strong Case for Printmaking by Martha Schwendener talks about these issues and discusses the exhibition Artistic Collaborations: 50 Years of Universal Limited Art Editions is at the Museum of Modern Art, through May 21.

Schwendener touches on several hot topics for the field of print including the move by many academic institutions to move away from traditional print techniques to digital technologies and the collaborative nature of the print shop. “Artistic Collaborations” marks the half-century milestone for the workshop but Schwendener questions the lack of emerging artists shown in the exhibition.