Crafting Collaboratively with Technologies of Re-production

This short paper draws from and compares two projects involving the authors in which digital and analogue reproduction technologies were used in collaborations with artists. In the first, artists were recruited to participate in iPad painting workshops and try out populist painting apps. The second project involved the earliest print technology, the woodcut. Coloured inks, rollers and wooden spoons were utilised by the first author in her role as "master printer", "pulling" limited edition prints—by hand—from blocks of incised wood in commercial fine art production. Digitisation facilitates massive and instantaneous copying and distribution without any loss of quality. By limiting reproduction and dissemination of prints, each one becomes more collectable and valuable. The paper considers how the inherent material degradation of traditional printmaking is a condition to which digital processes might aspire.