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Posted by Jason Urban on December 5th, 2009 | It’s early December and the holidays are nearly upon us. While we’re all getting sick of news stories about party crashers, it’s never too early to start thinking about your own holiday party guest list. You can borrow an printeresting idea from artist Joshua Callaghan and bring some celebrity cache to your yuletide get-together. Click on the picture for a link to Callaghan’s digital print project, Jay-Z Standing, Jay-Z Sitting.
While the hip hop superstar has a suspicious lack of legs, it doesn’t seem to be keeping people from enjoying his company. What would the holidays be without the interplay of reality and artifice?!
Posted by Jason Urban on June 2nd, 2009 | Sean P. Morrissey is a print artist to watch. Amazing screenprint/digital works and he does print-based installations, too.
 Sean P. Morrissey, The Best Thing in the World, Silkscreen & Digital, 30″x22″, 2009.
Posted by Jason Urban on December 15th, 2008 | “Baked” with love at Printeresting.org for your holiday pleasure… please enjoy our Printable Fruitcake! Click below to download a Printable Fruitcake PDF.
Posted by Jason Urban on December 11th, 2008 | News from the UK… In what has to be one of the more printeresting publicity stunts in recent times, Turner-prize winner Keith Tyson did a limited edition print giveaway two days ago.
Tyson allowed the first 5,000! Guardian readers who visited his website on December 9th to download a randomly generated image consisting of red, green and black vertical stripes- one download per IP address. Each visitor was expected to supply their own photo glossy paper.
The print images are based on one of his previous series, History Paintings. Tyson used a roulette wheel to generate the paintings but the prints are generated digitally. From The Guardian…
“The server will generate a sequence of the numbers one to 32 which relates to the roulette wheel,” he said. “Each number has an assigned colour. If you hit the jackpot, you’ll come away with an entirely green work. But the chances of that happening are 1 in 37 x 37 x 37, 49 times.”
Tyson’s piece brings up some interesting issues in regards to distribution and promotion. The Guardian article brings up a valid point when it mentions the degree to which the internet is underutilized as a vehicle for original artwork. Tyson himself acknowledges that this give-away, his first foray into printwork, is a fairly standard approach to interactivity…
His website – www.keithtyson.com – is, at the moment, primarily an information resource. But he hopes to exploit its possibilities more fully, by creating communities and open forums for discussions. “The print offer is one of the more conventional things I have planned,” he said. “I am always trying to bring the outside world into my work, rather than it’s being about the operation of an artist’s ‘unique eye’. This is just the first stage.”
So far he’s done a good job demonstrating the power a Turner Prize winner has to increase site traffic when coordinating a print giveaway with a major newspaper. People do love free stuff, after all. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.
Posted by Jason Urban on November 18th, 2008 | Janet Zweig, a Brooklyn-based sculptor, has some great work on her website that gives computer printers a second life and new meaning. The majority of Zweig’s printer-based sculpture was executed in the nineties- though not that long ago it is interesting to note the “old-fashioned” quality of the printers. While they obviously have a more vintage feel now than when they were made, the idea of repurposing printers for something more than thier practical origins is still a valid one. With digital technology’s astounding rate of obsolescence, university surplus stores around the country full of equipment begging for new uses.
 Janet Zweig, Thinking Contest, 1995.
About Thinking Contest from Zweig’s website…
Two computers were fed two different vocabularies of adjectives and nouns. In the gallery, each computer thinks up things using its vocabulary and writes sentences by saying “I am thinking of” followed by a randomly chosen adjective, followed by a randomly chosen noun. Some examples (from millions): “I am thinking of Etruscan careers.”, “I am thinking of theoretical mammals.”, “I am thinking of love-sick plywood.”, etc., etc. The big red needle gauges their brainpower.
 Janet Zweig, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1993.
A key component in Zweig’s work appears to be the performative aspect of the printing. The conversation in the work isn’t about printers/printing but the action of printing is integral to the piece.
Posted by Jason Urban on October 21st, 2008 |  Furniture Pallets, Digital Print on Coroplast, 24″x24″x3″, 2008.
Ever since Diana posted Process Oriented Furniture…, I’ve been meaning to mention the digital print work of Leslie Mutchler. Her work is currently on view at Big Medium in Austin, TX.
Mutchler has been working at the intersection of flatpack design and digital print for a few years now and this exhibition shows more results from her investigation. The sculptural Furniture Pallets are made from corrugated plastic and are covered with digital decals of furniture legs eluding to wood (and utilizing print). The pallets accompany a series of large-scale digital collages where Mutchler uses imagery appropriated from home furnishings catalogues to render landscape. The work stems from her interest in the marketing of organization as lifestyle. Read more here.
Discrete Space at Big Medium is a three-person exhibition curated by Joseph Phillips and also features the work of Sam Sanford and Jeannie McKetta.
Posted by Jason Urban on August 27th, 2008 |
One of the biggest advantages of working with digital output has to be its flexibility. Once an image/idea is developed as a file, it can be adapted to different formats and media so easily. It’s an obvious observation but an image can be printed 2′x 2′ for one purpose and 2″x 2″ for another. If art is about making decisions, digital print output increases the amount of choices an artist gets to make (or at least changes the order in which some of those decisions have to made, right?).
A few months ago while browsing through the shelves at Printed Matter, someone pointed out a great book to me. A simple collection of images by Derek Stroup called Candy. Stroup’s book is a good example of this potential for reformatting. His website includes a body of work called Candy- individual inkjet prints of simplified candy wrappers. They’re quite beautiful- all text is removed and the viewer is left with “clean” packages. The images serve as a bellwether for our consumer conscience. Stroup has created a game of recognition reminding us of the branding we normally ignore. Each is listed as 16″x20″.
Stroup’s book at Printed Matter collects all of these candy images into a small accordion-bound mini-portfolio. But rather than exist as reproductions of another media (like a book of offset-printed images of paintings or etchings), there is no degree of separation. The book is just a different version of his larger digital prints.
Posted by Jason Urban on July 16th, 2008 |
In September of 2007, 20×200 ”opened its doors” as an on-line extension of Jen Bekman Gallery. Every week, they release two new archival print editions. Each image is available in three sizes: small (8 1/2″x11″) in an edition of 200 for $20 each, medium (17″x22″) in an edition of 20 for $200, and large (30″x40″) in an edition of 2 for $2000. All prints are digitally printed with archival ink on 100% cotton rag paper. Every print comes with a signed and numbered Certificate of Authenticity (interestingly, the actual prints are not signed). From their website…
As we see it, there are a lot of people out there who want to sell their art and a lot of people who’d like to buy it. They just have a hard time finding each other. The internet is the perfect place to bring those people together, and we’re exactly the right people to make it happen. We’re passionate about art and the internet at 20×200. We’re excited about creating a place where almost any art lover can be an art collector.
Similar print-focused projects seem to be popping up; another example is Threadless Prints. These ventures are finding a new way to reach potential collectors and are benefiting from the internet’s democratizing effect. The project has opened up the white box of the gallery to people otherwise excluded (whether by finances, geography, etc.). With luck and careful development, projects like these can be “gateway drugs,” planting a taste for print that becomes habitual.
Posted by Jason Urban on June 6th, 2008 | 
Hey do-it-yourselfers! Ready for another installment of Printeresting’s DIY Friday? Hot on the heels of the 3D Printer, it’s another high-tech project… PRINT-ROBOTS!
Compliments of TeamEasyEnough at instructables.com… the Printbot. This little unit “prints” with chalk. Think Roomba with printing capabilities. It’s built using an iRobot platform and a dot-matrix printer. Check out the video…
Another similar but slightly different option is the Posterbot. The posterbot is the brain child of Wyatt Felt also at instructables.com. Motivated by his own illegible handwriting, he decided to produce a robot to do the work for him. This one uses a marker. Parts should run you a mere $50, a bargain considering the time and energy it will save!
Additional info and relevant links…
Posted by Jason Urban on June 4th, 2008 | 
George Olshevsky explains these images on his site Nuts about Nets much better than I ever could. I’ll just say that he’s a mathematician who is using the computer to visualize geometric problems- complex polyhedral configurations called nets. The products of his research are beautiful and strange images that he then produces as digital prints.
…astronomers produce prints of spiral galaxies and interstellar wonders, and naturalists produce prints of butterflies, flowers, and other beautiful organisms, so how about a mathematician offering prints of geometrical objects? People should know that such things exist within the realm of human knowledge!
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