What I mean by "Analogue/Digital Print"

 

The image starts as a physical drawing or painting. Almost all my drawings are in charcoal or pastel on paper, the paintings oil on canvas or wood. I then scan or photograph them creating an initial digital description. Some of these I put up on flickr at that point, so as an image there is no difference (in an informational sense) from the original object. Most often however, I work the image using Photoshop using a variety of techniques, creating a new binary work, which I then post as a "analogue/digital print". Sometimes the change from the original is simply to give the charcoal image a monochrome cast, one that makes it look better (to my eye) on a computer monitor:

 

 

Other images are colored (painted) modifications:

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielborisheifetz/6916420257/sizes/s/in/photostream/

 

still others may alter the original image significantly:

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielborisheifetz/3157724843/sizes/s/in/set-72157623701491353/

 

still others are combinations of drawings:

 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielborisheifetz/4884774664/sizes/s/in/set-72157624707940676/

 

What is common to all is that they began as physical objects.

 

In what sense do these images exist? Unlike physical objects, they can be copied without loss of information, and since anyone can own the information, no one owns it. This leads me to the question

 

What is my relation to these images?

 

It is when they are printed that they "return" to the familiar physical world we know as art "objects". If I choose the type and size of the paper, and sign it, then my role in it's origination is complete. And how are these "objects" valued? What is the difference in value between the original charcoal drawing and the print of a digital image based on it?

 

I don't know the answer to this. But there is undeniably a tension between information which can be indefinitely copied, and the physical objects which are the end products of an artist's sequence of choices.

 

Miscellaneous writings

 

Digital Print (Definition from ifpfa - International Print Dealers Association) "Artists who use a computer to create or manipulate their works often use a large-scale ink jet printer to print them... The distinction as to whether a digital print is an "original print" is determined by whether the work was created by the artist to be realized as a print. A digital print of a work that originated as a painting or drawing is a reproduction and there is not an original print."

 

From "Step into Liquid", an interview by Michelle Kuo (MK) with the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (WT) in the Sept., 2012 issue of Art Forum:

 

MK: I was struck by your reaction to the David Hockney exhibition in London this past spring ["S Bigger Picture," Royal Academy of Arts] ... you seemed especially taken by the shows structure in which traditionally painted canvases were shown alongside digitally produced paintings ...

 

WT: Hockney's exhibition is a fascinating example of the veil we put around medium ... Not only by his relentless dwelling on the subject matter of nature but also by his iPad paintings, which were actually ink-jet prints on paper mounted on Dibond.

 

Last month I was in Cologne to take a portrait of Hockney, and he talked about how amazing the quality of ink-jet printers is today... But then he added, "The images have to be drawn. You have to draw them. It can't come from photographs."

 

The interview continues to expand on the interplay of the digital work and the traditional. At one point WT says about the exhibition: "it almost seemed as if the iPad and video pieces ere there as foils, to underline, by contrast, the masterly position and unsurpassable value of actual on canvas."