Printmaking in the Post-Print Age

Printmaking in the Post-Print Age: Critical and Creative Methods in the context of Contemporary Art and Society

Developments in digital technology since the 1970s have led text and image away from traditional printing methods, heralding what has become known as the post-print age. The use of digital and multimedia platforms blur familiar distinctions between production and distribution as they emphasize real-time, display, virtual and editable or interactive modes of communication. Such transformations contest the traditional structures of author - audience relationships, whilst creating possibilities for new ways of seeing and interacting with the world.

Throughout its history, art has been understood variably as being about technique or beauty or something entirely different. Yet differences in our individual interpretations or value systems aside, art has fundamentally always been about our relationship with nature. So as the virtual begins to colonize nature, where do we stand? What is art? Meanwhile, there is an inextricable bond between the development of printmaking as art and that of printing as technology. So in the post-print age, what has the art of printmaking become? What challenges and new areas of potential are we presented with? This will be the focus of the IMPACT 9 International Printmaking Conference.