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Posted by amze on March 8th, 2010 | 
Who Doesn’t love bound printed stuff? The Print Center sponsored Open Book as a way to model ideas addressed in their Philagrafika 2010: The Graphic Unconscious exhibition. Needless to say most attendees walked away with a stack of books and Temporary Services (above) did their best to make sure no one walked away empty handed.
The Print Center describes the event:
This event will bring together the artist collectives Space 1026 and Temporary Services, who will be joined by the artists’ bookstore Printed Matter. Each will give presentations on their publications and how they relate to their artistic practice. It will be a wonderful opportunity to collect books, meet the artists and have them personally inscribe their books.
Continue reading Philagrafika 2010: Open Book
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Posted by RL Tillman on February 20th, 2010 | Somehow it became Fashion Week here at Printeresting, so I’ll share this advice from Quality in Print: Wear Neutrals in the Print Shop!
 RIGHT
 WRONG
Gordon Pritchard writes: “The color of what is worn gets reflected into the press sheet color…Unfortunately, the red or blue outfits in the above examples will distort the hues of the color in the presswork and may lead to incorrect color adjustments.”
You may prefer a Day-Glo wardrobe to match your Day-Glo posters, but according to the experts you’re doing it wrong!
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Posted by Jason Urban on February 18th, 2010 | (Thanks for the tip, Kathleen Hudspeth!)
Printeresting fashion news… Cynthia Rowley produces knock-offs of her own designs for Gagosian. The reproductions are quite literally photographic representations of the front and back of her runway designs which are then sewn together as a wearable garment. They are also available as unsewn bolts of fabric for a slightly lower price. This is a bizarre and fascinating exploration of authenticity. Limited edition multiples, photographic approximations of the original, being sold by a renown art world insider for a fraction of the cost of the actual garment with the consent of the fashion designer.
Is it art or fashion? Is it real or fake? Did Rowley and Gagosian cook up this idea while walking through the New Museum’s Urs Fischer show? Is it just a publicity stunt to get a post on Printeresting.org? Hmmm… all valid questions that will likely go unanswered.
 Cynthia Rowley for Gagosian, Silk and Feather Tufted Dress, 2010
Photographic representation of runway style printed on garment and sewn into a dress, One size, Edition of 100, $320.00
 Here is the completed garment a photo of the front and a photo of the back sewn together.
If you’re interested in this story, you can read more at Style.com. Here’s a quick excerpt…
“The product of a runway show is really a photograph,” Cynthia Rowley remarked last night at the launch of her new capsule collection for gallerist Larry Gagosian’s Gagosian Shop. “Yes, it’s great to experience the show in person, but what you’re left with is an image, with a front and a back. And within hours, those images are public. I thought, why should people wait six months to buy this? I’ll make it available now.” So she took a page from Duchamp and Warhol and appropriated herself. Using photographs of the fronts and backs of her highly textured Fall 2010 designs, presented only hours earlier, Rowley created her own reproductions—literally printed, cut out, sewn together again, and ready to purchase. Even bags were re-created as printed totes. “I am really eager to see what else we can re-create as a print,” says Rowley. “Jewelry? Underwear? Shoes, even? Why not in the future?”
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Posted by amze on February 5th, 2010 | 
With the SGC Philadelphia 2010 Conference just around the corner, it seemed prudent that we mention the other print conference happening in Philadelphia a week prior: The Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice Conference, running from March 18th – 20th.
The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mark both the inauguration of an African American literary tradition and the consolidation of American print culture. Yet these two most vibrant areas for American Studies scholarship are rarely considered in relation to one another. To the extent that scholars understand African American print culture at all, we do so with a dependence on critical models that assume that print is a stabilizing technology that underwrites the establishment of African American identity. But while the technology of print fixes impressions, print culture designates a world in which print both integrates with other practices and assumes a life of its own. Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice brings together more than a dozen distinguished and emerging scholars whose research demonstrates that the study of print culture has much to teach us about early African American literature and that early African American literature has the capacity to transform our understanding of print culture.
Sounds like an interesting conference with a scholars shedding light onto an often overlooked history of print in American culture.
These images are from the Library Company publicity for the conference.
Posted by RL Tillman on January 19th, 2010 |  A while back The Oatmeal published an online comic strip about desktop printers called “Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell To Make Us Miserable.”
At the time I didn’t mention it because, with all due respect to The Oatmeal, I think the home printer is a pretty easy target. After all, who among us has not felt the temporary madness of Printer Rage?
Anne Stewart at the Hotcards blog has responded to the comic with a provocative question: Is Desktop Printing a Hopeless Technology? SPOILER ALERT: Hotcards is a commercial printer, so the opinions expressed are not favorable to the home printer.
For a long time, there’s been a building sense of animosity towards the desktop printer. And while the rest of the infuriating things about technology seem to be improving, slowly but surely, it’s as if home printing technology hasn’t moved a step. It’s gotten more complex, yes, but it hasn’t gotten any more usable, or functional…
As the years tick by, and most technologies evolve, consumers are becoming more and more frustrated with the options available to them. And whether or not the desktop printing industry wants to hear it, it’s true: printing technology may be too complex for the desktop.
Stewart’s article is not entirely about the quality of printers but also the necessity of printing at home; she includes a link to Terry White’s Tech Blog post entitled Is home printing becoming obsolete? This seems unlikely. There’s tremendous potential in mobile digital devices, and also in outsourced printing, but sometimes you just want to print out that recipe.
I’m the last person to defend the desktop printer. My crappy HP scanner/inkjet is a frequent source of frustration. But when it works, it actually makes decent images. And printers may not be much more reliable or efficient than they were fifteen years ago, but they are more accessible. My local pharmacy sells three different kinds of printers, and they are dirt cheap. Talk about the Age of Mechanical Reproduction!
Posted by RL Tillman on January 13th, 2010 | Recently The Free Art and Technology Lab released GML, “a new XML file type specifically designed for archiving graffiti tags…a new digital standard for tomorrow’s vandals.”
http://www.vimeo.com/8072358
GML-archived tags are a sort of data-matrix with a wide array of possibilities for execution. Robotagger was quickly developed to allow an industrial robot-arm to do the writing:
http://www.vimeo.com/8691659
In 2008, we documented the Robot Bible-Scribe. The RoboTagger produces cruder results, but (at least theoretically) it also offers more flexible input options. This is smarter than a massive auto-pen.
From my perspective, this is a species of printing. But it’s difficult to contextualize the role of the various components. Above, I described the archived tags as a data-matrix, but that’s not quite right, is it? I welcome thoughts from our readers on the theoretical role of robot printers.
Posted by RL Tillman on January 10th, 2010 | The prophetic media-theorist Egon Spengler:
Posted by RL Tillman on December 2nd, 2009 | 
From Orson Squire Fowler’s pseudo-scientific Phrenological Almanac:
“Nature’s Printing Press is Man. Her types are Signs, her books are Actions.”
Now that’s a head-scratcher!
(image via)
Posted by RL Tillman on December 1st, 2009 | 
Step into the Printeresting Time Machine: we’re going back more than a quarter-century to read this 1983 New York Times article “American Painters Are Now Printmakers Too.”
Once upon a time, print people were not like the rest of us. In all but name, they formed a secret society. They had their clubs, their magazines and their coded language. Their talk was of states and stones, rockers and roulettes, foul biting and burr. What they were arguing about was usually a small sheet of paper. And the image – like a celebrated automobile of some 50 years ago – came in any color you wanted, provided that it was black…
There are still good printmakers who do nothing else. But since World War II, and more especially since 1960, the best printmakers tend to be the best painters also. Master printers make it possible for them to perform feats of technical address that would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. A huge new public now sees the print as a part of its birthright, along with the ice box and the air conditioner.
The “ice box”? I was just a kid in 1983, but I seem to remember that our kitchen had a refrigerator.
Posted by RL Tillman on November 4th, 2009 |  Hot Process, 2008
Thoughts on the faddishness of printmaking from Joel Gailer:
I see printmaking as potentially the most relevant form of contemporary art, it straddles both traditional and contemporary visual culture. Using a historical knowledge of print and visual production, I acknowledge that printmaking is the origin of our current visual world. All visual technologies derive from the historical processes of printmaking… Using a colloquial printmaking language that refers to the offset printing process and the term hot off the press, “Printmaking is so hot right now” is light hearted reverence for the historical and unique position printmaking occupies in the Fine Arts.
This piece was published at the artist’s expense in Art Almanac magazine, and subesquently won the 2008 Print Award from Australia’s Fremantle Arts Centre. (So why write about it now? Because according to studies, Printmaking’s 2008 Australia hotness was roughly equivalent to its 2009 U.S. hotness.)
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