Crafting Collaboratively in Cross-sectoral Art Practice

This short position paper draws from two contrasting projects involving the authors in which reproduction technologies—both digital and analogue—were used in collaborations with artists. The paper compares a very traditional analogue process with a current digital form of art re-production. In the first study artists were recruited to participate in iPad painting workshops and to collaborate on digital prototype development. The second discusses the first author's use of the earliest print technology: woodblock printing. Coloured inks, rollers and wooden spoons were used for "pulling" limited edition prints by hand from blocks of wood. Thirteen editions were made with the late painter Ken Kiff during the 90s. The paper briefly considers how the inherent material degradation of traditional print re-production processes—which make the prints collectable and valuable—are conditions to which digital processes might aspire.