Intaglio I Final Project

"Does the interiorization of media alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?", a question posed and subsequently explored in Marshall McLuhan's "The Gutenberg Galaxy" (1962), one of the concepts central to McLuhan's body of work to which this project is a reaction and response.

McLuhan suggests that "when technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." From the perspective, or lack thereof, experienced by people living in the present Age of Information, the implications of the interiorization of mass digital communication technology like the Internet seem to surpass anything conjectured during McLuhan's time, yet simultaneously confirm all his expectations. Writing in the 1950s and 60s, the technology he fully analysed was that of the printed alphabetical text, facilitated by the invention of the printing press, and the cultural and social transformations accompanying the transition from the oral tradition of manuscript-based media to the rational, codified and fragmented society with the book and the textual library of knowledge at its core.

Few individuals appear to have anticipated the Internet as fully (and as critically) as McLuhan, and very few still seem to be on the edge of grasping the interiorization and integration of these technologies as not just culturally significant but biological events; as paradigmatic shifts that radically affect humans at the level of our cognitive operational models. I am still fully shocked that in the near wake of the Sputnik launch, the earliest days of satellite transmission and television, someone was accurately anticipating that electric media meant the extension of the human nervous system into an "all-at-once" field of information, dissolving boundaries and uniting the globe, and the human family, on one stage; a pure prophecy encompassing Debord's spectacle, Baudrillard's simulacra/simulation, Virilio's dromosphere and Gibson's cyberspace.

I feel this idea of simultaneous and total involvement in each other – systems of exchange of information which facilitate a stage-like experience or virtual "presence" between people, however mundane – is perfectly exemplified by YouTube, a service most people in Western society are now at least familiar with. Through this project, I intended to capture something of the perspective I found myself in, watching recordings of Marshall McLuhan on a computer, through the Internet, in the YouTube window, describing phenomena which were, in fact, the exact things mediating the experience itself.

Through the combined use of print-based technology and modern, digital techniques, I produced a series of work that collides and superimposes models of media – appropriating a printed text which in turn is an appropriation of Greek history which once belonged to the hand-made manuscript and audile tactile tradition, and corrupting it and obviating it with the printed YouTube frame and temporality disrupting "pause" and "play" symbols, which are universal in our modern experience of media, a circumvention of time. The work is confusing and disjointed like the ever-accelerating and self-negating cultural media milieu in which we find ourselves; simultaneously a frozen video frame belonging to a dynamic visual system, a printed record of ancient history and a unique handmade manuscript, contexts and paradigms which make the past model obsolete and outmoded as we move forward without understanding the consequences of further and further extension of the human animal into a form of pure information. Images of a face, an eye staring into a grid of the electronic network, a communications satellite stamped in printed ink haunt the torn pages like the spectre of outmoded media and outmoded human perception haunting history, like McLuhan's cybernetic phantasm haunting cyberspace from the past, present and future simultaneously.

Intaglio Project 2 Complete

Spent way more time on this project that I anticipated, mostly due to computer issues which reminded me why I hate working on a computer, waking up at 3 and 4am to check whether or not a 90+ minute render has failed. I couldn't even render the full 9x12 image I had planned due to the 300dpi requirement necessary for printing, I changed my plans entirely at the last minute and created a layout of several smaller images.

Plate 1: Ambient Occlusion pass - an approximation of light radiating off non-reflective surfaces, self-occlusion and occlusion of and by surrounding objects

Plate 2: Reflections pass - surfaces set to 100% reflectivity, simulated generation of photon radiance emitted from 100% white surface "lights"

Designs for both plates printed on film with Xante digital printer which adds halftone dots

Copper plates coated with adhesive photosensitive film, allowed to dry then exposed with UV point light in vacuum table, developed like a photo in darkroom

Plates going in the acid bath, ferric chloride acts as an etchant on exposed copper

Closeup of etched copper plate magnified with jeweler's loupe, areas of photosensitive film that received the most exposure remain on the plate while areas that were occluded by the image remain as exposed copper that can be etched with acid

Finally, pulling prints from inked plates

"Consistent" edition of 7 prints on Yuki Gampi paper, 16x12

A schematic montage of a post-urban virtual space, digitally created and accessible as 3D geometry, printed anachronistically. Concrete jungle gives way to tropical cyberspace, ageographical networks driven by efficiency of connectivity, proximity to novelty, the appeal of the city extrapolated into the appeal of the "social network", the malleable, user-oriented virtual interactive environment.

Intalgio Project 2 Update

I'm working on the 3d geometry for the "virtual landscape" of my print project and an ocean simulation because I'm interested to see how I can translate it through this process. I might add some text element and figures, especially since I'm required to use at least one line technique, I haven't really decided what I'll draw on the plate where I use those techniques. I'll be rendering out the 3d scene in passes, probably a combination of flat diffuse + ambient occlusion and another for the reflections, then they'll be printed onto transparency and exposed with a UV point light onto photosensitive film that has been applied to the surface of the copper plates. The multiple pass print process is very similar to modern compositing in the digital workflow; layers are added cumulatively, affecting the preceding state of the image, colour and transparency are modified to achieve the desired effect when overlaid. I'm amused by the idea of using a 3d application like Maya or Softimage to create render passes which I will use to produce physically existent plates and pass physically through a press with and onto real material, the same way I would digitally composite the layers in Photoshop or After Effects. There's something very funny and interesting about using modern technology to ultimately produce matrices to use in a final process that was the cutting edge technology in image generation 500 years ago, rescued from anachronism and obsolescence by the kind of innovations that make this possible and our continued interest in methodology, of course.

I'm still trying to figure out how to convey the idea of a users engaging in the process of creating the new "urban" or post-urban space, though I think the digital environment on its own is interesting enough to satisfy the requirements of the project.

"The history of city growth is, in essence, man's eager search for ease of human interaction. Our large modern urban nodes are, in their very nature, massive communications systems."
-Webber, M. 1964. Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm. 

"Invisible spaces now dominate, as the city of the modernist era is replaced by the non-place urban realm and outer space is superseded by cyberspace." - Bukatman, S. 1993. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.

Intaglio Project 2 Planning

The prompt for my second project for Intaglio printing class is simply "Architecture, cityscape and the urban environment" and it needs to include at least one line technique (drypoint, engraving, etching) and at least one tone technique (aquatint, photo-etch, sugarlift, whiteground) to produce an edition of 7 consistent prints and 3 "states" or proofs that are all different. We've had demos on most of the techniques involved except photo-etching, which is of course the one I want to focus on.

Conceptually I started thinking about what is interesting to me about "architecture, cityscape and the urban environment" (which are things I thought about a lot during my "Metacities" project last year) and more so than the physical forms of the architecture of the city, it is always the experience - what it means to be in those spaces, the way the individual exists and interacts within and shapes the city/environment, that presents interest to me. The choice people make to live in certain cities or just a city in general, the choices they make in collectively shaping the city socially and physically, what is it that draws us to certain places, that we think we can get in one place and possibly not somewhere else?

I thought about living in London, the bipolarity of modern architecture and a new culture growing symbiotically out of a city far older than colonized North America, the experience of constant, everyday reminders of newness and novelty and change dichotomized alongside the permanence of fixed history and tradition. The opportunities available there included access to some of the "best" museums and galleries in the world, venues that house not only important historical work but present the newest big shows and exhibitions, it's a stop for every touring musician and band, it felt like a place of exposure, where artists, musicians and designers can potentially receive very real attention and establish themselves - cities are referred to as "centers" of art and culture, the separate but connected locales of a world stage, nodal points where these things are cultivated. 

There is a desire tied to the idealized City that promises the individual the forefront of progress, witness at the event horizon of novelty and change where more new options are available, and I remembered William Gibson describing cities as "vast, multilayered engines of choice":

"I walked through my hometown, imagining it a city. What I was imagining, I now see, was an increase not in size but in number of choices. Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers. You never know whom you might meet in the city. In a small town, you’re less likely to encounter people or things or situations you haven’t encountered previously.
As a boy, I took myself away to cities as quickly as I could and have lived in them ever since. When I travel now, I travel mainly to cities, and I travel to return to those I know, taking a deepening pleasure in the serial experience. The idea of visiting a fascinating city only once saddens me, and I seldom have a city I've come to know without wondering if I'll see it again. But in our ageographical existence, I am never entirely not in London, entirely not in Tokyo.
The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don't live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it's still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities." -William Gibson

The "ageographical", virtual existence established by technology like the Internet is something I have grown up with, it is taken for granted that from anywhere with wifi I have a form of access to data representing happenings in all other places. Gibson dreamed of the vast array of opportunity offered by existence in a city (as people still do) but there is now a form of equalization facilitated by the information age through the mass dissemination of "culture" or spectacle and geographical location is no longer the prime determinant of what we are exposed to (albeit exposure on a 2D screen is something completely different from "lived experience" but I won't get into that). The migration to cities is not obviated by the connective digital landscape but supplemented; services like Google Maps and social networking and mobile devices overlay a user-controlled experience onto the cityscape, we're probably all familiar with finding out about things and where to go in the real city online - "word of mouth" is still fundamental but the "mouth" is more and more a virtual one.

Google "Project Glass" augmented reality head-mounted display

I also grew up with an idea that was seeded into the collective unconscious largely by Gibson: an immersive virtual reality that seemed only just around the corner in the 80s and 90s. If the city is a vast engine of choice then the virtual city is an infinite one. It was only a matter of time, given the exponential technological advance, before we would all be strapping on headsets and literally plugging in to a fully sensory experience of a virtual world that would drown out consensus reality completely. I don't know what anyone reading Neuromancer in 1984 imagined 2012 would have been like but we're still mostly staring at flat planes, struggling to keep building our physical cities, nevermind constructing the new urban landscapes out of photons and data, no one has uploaded their consciousness to the Internet and properly abandoned the world of the flesh as far as I know, and experiments like Second Life are pretty much the most we have to show of the embarrassing state of the virtual worlds initiative. Still, I feel like the trajectory is still there, even if technology isn't, and beyond our experience in the real city, many of us seek the advancement toward the collective, ageographical, user-developed digital architecture of utopian cyberspace.

With this project I want to imagine what could have been or what could still eventually be, a sort of homage to the halted dream of the new urban landscape, which is a modular virtual one we can influence at will and control at the true rate of novelty. The creation or visualization of "spaces", whether they are architectural or city-like or not is a constant in human creative ideation and is a fundamental meditative healing act in many traditions - I see a lot of similar psychological inclinations linking projection of virtual worlds and Mahayana purelands. As the pursuit of experience of spaces which offer us what we want continues into this kind of territory, it becomes less about the physical structure and materiality of the city's presence and more about the effects we wish to evoke, functionality will take a back seat to the activation of numinous symbols and the human psyche will become the true foundation upon which the post-urban environment is built.

Intaglio Printmaking

I didn't really know what intaglio was before starting this course, screenprinting was full so it was either this or lithography for a printmaking choice for the semester, it's been fun and interesting so far.
The basic process is to cut a thin sheet of copper to a desired size that functions as the plate or matrix that will be used to produce prints, bevel the edges with a file and polish the plate with steel wool, degrease the plate, apply contact paper to the back, coat the plate in a "ground" which is usually like a kind of wax that has to be melted on a hot plate, though it can also a liquid or another process altogether, like an ink solution applied by airbrush. Once the wax ground is dried, it can be etched into with markmaking tools, then given an acid bath (we use ferric chloride rather than an actual acid at school), which corrodes into the metal exposed by the drawn lines, providing a negative surface for ink to adhere into. There are also various cleaning steps that need to be carefully observed, as well as the use of solvent-resistant gloves and a respirator mask.

Etching a design into the wax hardground covering a copper plate

After the marks have been made and the ground/resist material removed, the plate is given a vinegar bath and the paper cut and soaked in water to increase its absorbency (I think?). Then the messy stuff begins; ink is selected and mixed with various modifiers and manipulated until it reaches the desired consistency.

Inking workspace

 

Ink is applied to the plate with a putty spreader and pushed around so that it fully saturates the depressions, then excess is removed with scrapers, newsprint, starchy material called tarlatan and the surface dusted with a light brushing of talc, the plate must be inked and wiped for every print so it can be a fairly long process, not to mention cleanup if you make as much of a mess as I did.

Pulling theoretically identical prints from one matrix on Rives BFK paper

Ink is transferred to paper by way of a massive printing press, a template is used to properly align the plate and paper which is especially important when the project calls for multiple passes or if several plates are being used. This project was just one plate and simple linework etching techniques, this week I've been learning about alternative methods like aquatint, mezzotint and lifts which are generally used to produce tonal, textural effects, the next project will be much more complex.

Light Trails

Finally got the shot I was looking for. Phosphorescent ink on white cotton, UV lighting.

Futher Print Designs

Another print pattern made from a line drawing, mirrored and flipped to become a tiling pattern, rescaled, printed on translucent acetate and onto grey cotton.

Screenprinting

A fairly messy and tedious process but I made this digital collage/print motif...

into this screen...

and made these prints...

which glow in the dark!

Print Layering

Translucent print layering, I hope to replicate this effect with fabric.

City Print

 Print pattern made from one of my cityscape drawings.

Detail.

Further editing.