19/FA-PRNT-205-01 Print 1 Press the space button to cycle through my response!
With your found-object monoprint in mind, think about the Benson reading. If you can make pictures and distribute them instantly via digital means, why bother making prints at all? At least in the beginning, prints felt very intimate and personal to me in the process. Starting with handprints on the wall is the earliest recording of humans and their behavior. Although that can be captured now, a picture of someone’s hand, it doesn’t have the same feeling as a handprint on the wall. Making prints even though we can make pictures is essential because it provides variety in an online based world. Why separate the two worlds at all? Why not integrate making prints with making pictures via digital means? Benson does not discuss how printmaking can be a method of recording. In what ways can “printing as recording” justify or change the act of printing? With the need to print more volume wise and more efficiently, printing lost its personal and intimate touch. Printing can be done now without the touch of the human hand, and while this changes the act of printing; I think for the sake of spreading information it was a step in the right direction. Printing as recording and the integration of machines makes printing to me feel very mechanical, detached, and impersonal. Back before, the industrialization of printing however, printing as recording still existed but in a different way (in a more personal way). Respond with a series of images; use an image of one of your prints from this week, or process images and turn them into something new.
