Analogue Swallows Digital

Last week I attended Impact7, billed as the "international multi-disciplinary printmaking conference", at Monash University in Melbourne.  This is the seventh in a series of conferences that began in England in 1999.  The core subject-matter of the conference was traditional printmaking: woodcuts, drypoint, etching and so forth.  However, there were a substantial number of presentations referring to digital media, and presentations exploring links between print-making and artists' book, zines, photography and graphic design.  There was also considerable discussion of education in the visual arts.  In the four days there were nearly 150 presentations (talks and demonstrations) and a substantial number of exhibitions.

I was curious to know how the traditional print-makers have reacted to the invasion of their field by Photoshop, inkjet printers and so forth.  The answer appears to be that the new methods have simply been incorporated into print-making practice: there were repeated references to the new technologies as providing just another set of tools, and discussion of the "expanded field" of print-making.  Analogue has swallowed digital.  Whatever debate there was in the printmaking community about digital media is now over, though occasionally concern was expressed that the "hand" of the artist might be missing.  I did hear a response to the effect that the mind of the artist is more important.

My own presentation argued that the computer can be more than a tool and that having outsourced the work of the artist's hand to machines, we are now starting to outsource the work of the artist's mind to machines also.

Visual Music Films, Multimedia Performance

Brigid Burke has organised a multi-media night at Loop bar in Melbourne. One of my abstract videos will be played, along with works by Dennis Miller and Grayson Cook, and there will be a live performance by Brigid Burke and Adrian Sheriff, playing clarinet, trombone, shakuhachi and laptop, with live video projections.

Where: Loop Bar Back Room, 23 Meyers Place, Melbourne. (Meyers Place is on the south side of Bourke Street, between Exhibition and Spring Streets, near Parliament Station.)
When: Wednesday 5th October, 7pm.
Info: http://www.brigid.com.au/performances.asp and http://www.looponline.com.au/.

Impact7 Conference

There is an international conference at Monash University coming up called Impact7. It is billed as the "International Multidisciplinary Printmaking Conference" and is held every two years. The core topic is traditional print-making, but many other areas are involved, and there is a substantial digital media stream. I will be giving a presentation as part of a session on "Digital Media: Aesthetics and Materiality" in the morning of Thursday 27th September.

The conference website: http://impact7.org.au/.

In association with this conference half the art galleries in Melbourne are putting on exhibitions of prints: there is a list at http://impact7.org.au/mofp/index.html. The Art Gallery of Ballarat (where I live) specialises in works on paper, and it is putting on a substantial exhibition of prints from its collection, from the colonial period on.  The Gallery's website is at http://www.artgalleryofballarat.com.au/.

St Patrick's College Ballarat Art Prize

My work Tree Circle has been selected for the St Patrick's College Ballarat Art Prize.

Where: St Patrick's College Ballarat, Old Collegians Pavilion. (Entry from Wanliss St.)
When: September 7 to September 11 2011.
Gala launch: Wednesday September 7th at 7pm. Entry by ticket from the College.

More information here (go to "Community" and then "Flanagan Art Prize").

London and Home

I spent a week in London before heading home.  The riots there erupted the night before I left, but not in central London, and I only found out about them from a TV in the airport as I was waiting for my flight to Australia.

In London I spent time at the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, but I also looked at the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Museum, all wonderful institutions.

Ai Weiwei, "Sunflower Seeds" (ceramic), 2010

The Natural History Museum, as well as having some spectacular displays, is a great research institution and holds hundreds of thousands of so-called type specimens.  A type specimen is the first specimen of a species to be described scientifically, and acts as a reference for all subsequent work on that species.

Spectacle: the entrance to the Earth Sciences display in the Natural History Museum

And the Science Museum has a range of material from Stephenson's "Rocket" locomotive (1829) to the Apollo 10 command module, that flew round the Moon in 1969.

Diagram in the Science Museum showing the geometric construction of one of the elaborate illustrations from the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript

I saw the Lindisfarne Gospels manuscript itself in the British Library (though of course it was only open at one page, which wasn't this one).  The manuscript dates from 700 AD or shortly afterwards, so to see it at all was astonishing enough.

 So ends my grand art tour.