Compressionist printmaking: a 500 year old digital performance and analog archive

final engraving with japanese paper process

Here’s one of the printmaking experiments I’ve been working on over at the David Krut Workshop (fun space; and cool to brag to my overseas friends that it’s who William Kentridge has always worked with for most of his prints). It’s a detail from this image (the Emmarentia Lilies triptych, originally printed on metallic paper), which I’ve then engraved by hand, and Jill (the awesome printer I am working with) went ahead and, after inking it up, added two layers of thin glued paper before pressing it. That process is called Chine-collé, and is what resulted in the varying colors behind the black ink. For more images, see Compressionism on my flickr. There’s also a lithograph / spit bite combo test I’ve been working on ("nude descension") posted to my kagablog page.

Compressionism is a digital performance and analog archive. In the current studies, I compress bodies, spaces and objects by traversing their surfaces with an image scanner, along varying 3-dimensional paths – literally, I glide, run, hover and swoop across windows, trees, or lilies while the scanner head is in motion. The resulting digital images, which are transfigured down to the size of a small piece of paper, are then re-stretched to their original size, sometimes cropped or colorized. The final prints ask us to ‘look again’ at the relations between subjects, objects, actions and perceptions. At present, I’m taking selections from a series of about 25 Compressionist lambda prints, and iteratively producing traditional (old’s cool!) prints in the form of lithographs, engravings, etchings, silk screens, spit bites, aquatints, and possibly more.