Evolution of Print

This is something I’ve been meaning to add for a few weeks now. It’s somewhat tangential to printmaking but will likely have broader ramifications on the future definition of “print”. We’ve been talking about the death of the printing industry but I think there is a flip side to that as well… new technologies that offer new possibilities. Speaking of Darwin, we can look to him for the key: adaptation.

There have been a few posts at printeresting on the subject of 3-D printers (see here and here). RepRap is an open source 3-D printer project started by Dr. Adrian Bowyer and a team of engineers at the University of Bath in England. One of Bowyer’s ultimate goals with RepRap is to make a machine that can self-replicate. He named the first RepRap model Darwin and his reasoning is as follows…

Since childhood I have wanted to make a replicating machine, but the genesis of RepRap was my realisation that, in order to succeed, such a machine would have to live and to evolve symbiotically with people.

But which symbiosis to copy biomimetically? I decided upon the one between the flowers and the insects. I reasoned: why not make a machine that needs the help of people to reproduce, just as the clover needs the bee to carry its pollen? And why not have the machine make goods for the people to reward them for their help, just as the clover makes nectar to reward the bee? Such a machine should prosper with Darwinian stablity alongside its human collaborators.

This seems to be a kind of scientific “chicken or the egg” situation and has generated some seriously heated dialogue. Here’s an example of the strong case against the likelihood of machine self-replication. The debate is fascinating even if somewhat dizzying. Regardless of the potential for self-replication, this kind of technology really blows the lid off the potential for desktop publishing and could put another nail in the coffin of supply-side economic theory.

It seems very possible that in the future, artists will be “printing” more sculpture than two-dimensional works on paper.