
Photo owned by katerha (cc)
Many years ago, I was a printmaker. I’d spend time agonising over the weight, grain, weave and composition of paper. Reversing the design on tracing the design and staying true to the outline, hatching and colour-whitespace balence, all vital. The ritual of spread, mask and swipe was hypnotic. At the end of the day, you hoped that your end result somehow paid tribute to your sketches.
And lo, the variety of the pieces were a testament to the process and to their individuality. At the back of your mind, though, was the clear and present truth – that your work needed to be scarce and transigent.
Prints, whatever their process or medium are defined by their exclusivity. A print off a run of 10 is far more precious than one of equal quality from a run of 10,000. Buy a print from a printmaker and look close, you’ll notice that it’s numbered. That number a maker in time, space and effort. A footprint of scarcity.
Ask a printmaker what they do with print 11 in 10 print run, and they’ll tell you they hollow out the centre of the surface and produce a ruined print. The end result is numbered to prove that the run has hit its limit.
The other day, I was reminded of the hyperlocal newspaper project in the UK. The project took London boroughs and took data on local services and packaged them into a handy paper. Taking that information that lives in the abstract and transposing onto a format that New Media gurus say is dead – paper.
Paper has been our message boy for centuries. To copy what the UK project has done wouldn’t really push us into new territory. But it might kick off ideas about the sharing the lazy neighbour chats that would have sang over the wall of the back garden fifty years ago.
I wonder if we took are news, our art and everything else we churn out just like the printer limiting his run, applied a best before date to it before publishing it on paper, web (a dissolving page after X hits) or whatever medium took our fancy – how this would change the consumption and dissemination of the news?
And just like spreading ink over each mask aims to repeat our initial design, but physical factors like pressure, temperature, materials and human factor make each one unique – what would automated faults, specialisation and just-in-time updates do for limited publications?