Out of print.

"Remote Sensing," the 24th Annual Southern Graphics Council Conference, gathered together the largest group of printmakers ever assembled in North America, in an attempt to radically rethink the role of print-making in the digital era. The conference organizers - Carmon Colangelo, Sergio Soave and Christopher Hocking - clearly aimed to expand the definition of printmaking, imbuing it with a greater sense of the possibilities for cultural observation and criticism, as the media and techniques addressed included photography, installation, community-based art projects, film, computer imaging, interactive digital collaborations and sculpture, as well as traditional printmaking areas.

It became obvious during the course of the conference that printmaking as a discipline was undergoing, in plain view of the participants, a shift away from hidebound notions of craft and quality. The field of printmaking since the 1960s always has sought to place itself firmly in the context of the high arts and to argue for the technical rigor of its artistic production. The desire to place the discipline on an equal footing with other fine-art media such as painting and sculpture often has resulted in a rear-guard, reactionary stance that denies the reproducible nature of printmaking. This old paradigm is yielding (with some obvious discomfort to the arriere-garde) to a redefinition of printmaking as a means of critically anticipating, reflecting, or even reshaping cultural formations in the mass media, using new or hybrid strategies as a means of effective communication. This notable rethinking of the basic tenets of printmaking led to an unusually provocative conference.

Although many customary concerns of printmakers were a part of the program - that is, concerns about inks, papers and presses - obvious evidence of the sea-change in printmaking's theoretical underpinnings and raison d'etre could be found in the very title of the conference, "Remote Sensing," which implies a mediated process of sensory experience, where exploration and interaction with the world is filtered through the lens of technology, divorced from traditional notions of the limits of the body. Printmaking, like photography and other media that have the potential for mechanical reproduction, has often attempted to make visible the hand of the artist in an assertion of craft. A remote experience must either extend the reach of the body and the body's senses, or assert that the divorce of body from medium is complete. Therefore, issues of the body and its boundaries especially informed the panel discussions and key exhibitions held during the conference.

The featured speaker on the opening night of the conference, Simon Penny, fired the first salvo at the traditionalists as he argued against the existence of the Cartesian mind/body split. Penny, a professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, emphatically rejected one of the ideas held dear by the emergent digerati: that bodily experience is only a messy "wet-ware" expedient for mental, virtual realities. Penny claims that somatic, visceral experience "from the belly" is inseparable from the realm of the mind. Penny does not reject digital strategies, but he cautioned that there are potential conflicts of interest inherent in artists working with machines that attempt to replicate a humanized, bodily experience. The intensive search for the relationship of "body" to "exterior" was also an important part of Steve Murakishi's talk, "Gnarly Futility." Murakishi, who is the head of printmaking at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, pointed out that the sensory mechanisms of the body are being supplanted by remote devices. Murakishi's examples were drawn from a wide range of sources: from frozen fish sticks to remotely-guided "smart" bombs.

In a presentation titled "Are We There Yet? Remote Sensing and the Brave New World," art critic Eleanor Heartney sounded a note of caution against the uncritical acceptance of the rhetoric of virtual reality and remote sensing when she argued that art must seek a role as an "in between" in digital society. Art must stake a claim as a realm separate from the real, claimed Heartney. She worries that the collapse of the distinction between the artificial and the real in a digital world could reduce the complexity of artistic experience, seducing the viewer with a "brave new world which is in reality a mindless reinforcement of the status quo." The role of printmaking, in Heartney's estimation, occupies a particularly significant place in the theoretical discussion of art in the digital era. The print is "perhaps the ultimate work of simulation," said Heartney, and blurs the distinction between the virtual and the real. The processes that come between the artist's hand and the finished product raise the issue of authenticity, a key concept for a discussion of virtuality.

Other notable speakers included Hugh Merrill from Kansas City Art Institute, who discussed cross-disciplinary approaches to collaboration among artists; Frances Myers, from the University of Wisconsin, who outlined the many points of convergence between photography, new media and printmaking; Cara Jaye, from West Virginia University, who explored the relationship between manipulated photographs and the reality through her own stained, nude self-portraits and Patricia Villalobos Echeverria, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, whose talk on her own exploration of transculturation and identity was augmented by a recorded spoken-word performance.

The main exhibition that accompanied the conference, also entitled "Remote Sensing," was a strong group show featuring 21 artists, marked by a wide variety of theoretical concerns. According to their catalog statement, curators Colangelo and Soave aimed to present "a sampling of works that asserted the potential of broad and inclusive definitions of print." The most interesting pieces in the exhibition tended to stretch the boundaries of printmaking. Cartoon Hits (1996) by Christopher Sperandio and Simon Grennan, a four color comic book, is based on stories submitted to the artists by members of the institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Cima Katz's Married Bed (1995), a computer-manipulated Iris print, chillingly depicts the conjugal bed as a weathered grave. Michael Rodemer used a live computer feed and video to remotely-sense weather in Chicago, simulating the wind and the view in a mixed-media installation.

The strength of the conference "Remote Sensing" was that it encouraged it's participants to explore printmaking as an evolving medium. Perhaps inevitably, there were tensions between those who embraced the larger definition of the discipline and those who believed that "going digital" is a passing fad. But the consensus of the participants seemed to be that printmaking, in its new incarnation, would gain greater critical importance in the future.

MICHAEL SLAVEN, assistant professor of history at California University of Pennsylvania, also writes for Art Papers and the New Art Examiner.