LECTURE @ PURCHASE – Inge Bruggeman – Connections to flat-panel digital displays

On March 26^th, I went to see one of the School of Art and Design lectures, given by a guest lecturer named Inge Bruggeman, a visiting art professor who specializes in Letterpress and Book arts at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She gave a lecture on how she does her specialty prints of books using hand-operated “windmill” presses that allow for her to create her own text-based artwork. She focuses on the visual nature of text and the subjectivity of reading and defining. To be more specific, she uses the way the text is formed on paper in order to create art such that the way the text is formed on the page will add to the meaning of the words, or will add simply a new perspective on looking at the text as a work of art. Bruggeman’s goal, after all, is to get us, the observers, to look at the text for longer that it takes to read it in order to have us appreciate the graphics that go into creating the words that we see in every day life.

Among the things that were shown in Bruggeman’s presentation were a multitude of books and poems that she used as examples of how she did her art. Among the works she showed were a book of poems where she had drawings of sound waves that were used to illustrate the nature of the poetry in the book (the poems all had a certain type of rhyme scheme). Another work was something called the “Mickey Mantle Koan” which was a book that was printed entirely on leather in order to reflect the desires of the author. Since the book was printed on leather, Bruggeman had to press deeper down and work a little longer in order to get the text to set into the pages. She also needed to use a special ink in order to get the words to set into the leather. She said during the lecture that her preferred means of conveying images onto paper was to use photopolymer plates that were able to essentially be made from molds of metal that would then be pressed down into the paper in order to make illustrations and etchings that had nice laminated sheen before being taken back to the artist for coloring.

After listening to this presentation on letterpress printing, I thought of an article I had read long ago (all the way back in February 2004) in Scientific American on new display technologies that had the potential to replace the standard LED technology that we find today in our various consumer electronics – flat-panel TVs, cell phone displays, digital camera displays, GPS systems, and anything else that requires a display to show the output. These two new types of display technologies – OLED (organic light-emitting diode), and PLED (polymer light-emitting diode) – provided the potential not only to be used as the material for small, hi-res displays used in laptops, PDAs, digital cameras and home TVs, as a replacement for the more costly, less energy efficient and more difficult to manufacture LCD and LED technologies, but also the potential to be used on a wide variety of receiving materials – among those flexible plastic and metal foil! In essence, we would be able to create displays that can roll up into and out of tubes for easy storage! Besides being remarkable in its own right, the potential of these new display technologies led me to believe that perhaps the printed word was now under SERIOUS threat from the world of electronics. I wonder now that if companies like Pioneer and Samsung really start using this display technology (which, based on the date of the article, Feb. 2004, would only be a few years from now), that the printed word would now truly be dead, and people would seek their books to be read on fold-out plastic OLED displays instead of by the printed word….

Still, I imagine there are plenty “analog” art enthusiasts out there who would still love to see the remarkable art of people like Inge Bruggeman in the real incarnation. For in order to appreciate this art, I remember Bruggeman allowing us to go up to her examples that she brought in and touch them. Indeed, though this may be an uncommon experience, it shows you that art can not necessarily be boxed into a virtual, digital electronic display that would only allow you to see the image of a book from the calculated angles given by the photographer, rather than being able to analyze the book from your own vantage point, where you choose to see the actual book from whatever angle you would like to look at the book, even being allowed to touch the book if the museum so permits you to do so. But still, the threat to the printed word still looms. If books are put on these roll-up plastic displays, then that may still be enough to make books so unpopular that people like Bruggeman would no longer be able to sell their books, and thus their businesses would die out by attrition. That would be sad. Perhaps the key would be to allow such wonderful art to be generated in such a place like the matrix of Neuromancer, since such a place would perhaps allow for the art to co-exist alongside the technology, since it is a place where resources are less constricting and would allow for such co-existence – the unity of virtual and real, authentic “analog” art within a digital realm. Whether any of my fears or hopes comes true, however, remains to be seen…