Coincidence is a funny thing. No sooner have I posted about an article celebrating the mystery of process and its ability to create art, specifically using the example of the vagaries of the four colour (or what is otherwise known as CMYK) print process, that I see another article where an artist is exploiting the result by way of a totally different process.
Louise Naunton Morgan, the “Human Printer” has been featured on Generator X with her hand ‘printed’ images. She takes images, uses computer technology to split them into their constituent four colours, and then proceeds to use these to lay down each colour by hand (seemingly on trace paper). Composed to look like the tell-tale four colour dot effect from an offset printer, the resulting images hide their very time consuming, one-of-a-kind production method.
I mentioned previously in reference to the Defense of Dots article, that the background colouring was the part that the comic book artists had little control over, and thus they, as I do at times, ‘trusted to the process’ this part of their output. This is one artist who has decided that this is an aesthetic she is deliberately trying to manipulate, and thus she has invented her own process to ensure the result. For the comic artists this same result was was a little more randomly induced.
I wonder if, in ensuring a floored or ‘human’ result, a little bit of the art has been lost? Or is it that a human must now take the place of the floored machine, given the eradication of bugs in the new machinery?