INTERTYPES

Installation gathering 2D prints, 3D prints, light, texts and plinths

2019

P.-A. Gauthier & T. St-Pierre

INTERTYPES is an installation and a reflection on the cultural meaning of 3D printing in the longest historical line of printing and its cultures in relation to society. As with our recent works, we are particularly interested in the historical and cultural continuity of technologies. With INTERTYPES, we approach different facets from a "remediation" perspective, i.e. how past technologies influence the cultures of emerging technologies, and from a media archaeology perspective. How, for example, do past cultural/historical artifacts or accidents find their way into technologies and into our current technological cultures? As a watermark, we also reflect on the printed and moving image in history, on the idea of veracity and truth marker in particular. 3D impressions of simulated historical artifacts subtly occupy the ambiguous space of these questions.

The installation consists of 3D prints, 2D prints and synthetic videos, as a narrative counterpoint to the installation, using the features of a slow science fiction.

In the future, will printing still exist? Will it ever stop? Beyond these questions, curved printing plates, "mises en pâte", other defects and "noir de fumée" still inhabit and subtly form our cultures: galaxy of printed historical artifacts, script residues and past organizations. A kind of historical encoding that intertwines cultures and technologies, leaving clues left to historians who decode the printing history. And now, what is this thing: three-dimensional printing? What it tells us, what is its message? Why does it borrow the disguise or marketing of traditional printing? Borrowing established forms and meanings, a kind of remediation so that this newcomer seems real, real to us. Promising us a future worthy of the strongest science fiction and instanced, even magical, manufacturing, is 3D printing so smooth and perfect? With INTERTYPES, we read 3D printing technology in the historical and cultural line of printing, texts and images. Intertypes: between types, between periods, there is still a continuous path. Solidifying inks and chemicals, smoke and dust.

The work is funded by the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec (Estrie) territorial program, following a territorial partnership agreement with the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop's University and Sherbrooke's History Museum.