Panel Statement

Panel: Digital Print

In the last few years, significant improvements have been made in the technology of output: converting the image on the computer screen to a tangible object, retaining or enhancing its richness of colour, detail and texture. Used with skill and imagination, computers can offer the artist-printmaker an unprecedented variety of techniques, approaches, and working methods a new repertoire of media and processes. The integration of computer-generated imagery with more traditional art-making processes creates opportunities for further creative evolution, enhanced stability of texture and colour and an emphasis on physicality. Images created in this way are often re-digitised for further development and finally exist as both printed and electronic data. They then have the potential to become ‘indefinite images’ open to reconsideration, revision, collaborative manipulation and cross-disciplinary utilisation via the Internet, in a vastly expanded creative domain. Despite the seductive effect of evolving technologies, it is the new conceptual spaces and their challenge to current artistic practice opened through computing media that are the most exciting areas for creative exploration by artists, allowing access and exchanges utilising previously inconceivable inter-connectivity.

• Sue Gollifer (UK), University of Brighton