Abstract

TRANSMEDIAL—a research project with accompanying international printmaking exhibition examines diverse intersections between art, technology, and science. It considers Ruth Pelzer-Montada’s call to acknowledge key sensorial aspects within traditional and contemporary technologies in printmaking and interprets the impact of digital technology in broader terms of institutional, critical and cultural discourses. Curated by artists and researchers Monika Lukowska and Sarah Robinson, TRANSMEDIAL asks: how has this technology embedded itself within the printmaking medium technically and also conceptually and what are its implications for audiences, artists, and the field? A critical analysis of multisensorial modes of engagement generated by artworks, where aesthetics originate from algorithmic data, sound waves and robotics, is situated alongside seminal writing in the field by theoreticians Frieder Nake and Ruth Pelzer-Montada. Sharing an affinity of expanding technologies, Marta Pogorzelec’s lenticular prints, Magda Stawarska-Beavan’s soundscapes, and Jo Stockham’s rotating 3D BotSelf lie between virtual and material worlds, blending digital data with printmaking materiality. In addition, the TRANSMEDIAL exhibition showcased Paul Catanese’s performative drone technology with lithography, innovative approaches to matter by Santiago Pérez’s digital design fabrication, and colloidal chemistry expert Susanne Klein’s reinvention of nineteenth-century Woodburytype, amongst others. TRANSMEDIAL initiates a dialogue about the future of the printmaking medium, currently navigating from physical matrices to a space that merges digital data, traditional processes, and new technologies. By examining how the viewer’s experience has changed and how print as a medium has been challenged, this research aims to position printmaking in a rapidly changing global art context.