Impact 2005 is an international printmaking conference started by my 'alma mater' (to use the america parlance) CPFR and hosted this time by academy of fine arts in Poznañ, Poland, and the Universität de Künste, Berlin, and organised by the University of Tennessee. My paper is nearly ready, and as i've just secured funding through my university, I can confirm that I'm going. The paper takes me back into my core research area and was written so as to explore the pedagogic implications of inter-disciplinary activities. The abstract goes a lot like this:

Paper: "Interstitial Languages: Photographers and Printmakers"

Printmakers are not photographers and vice versa. However, both fields share common territory. Within educational structures the fields are still divided, as the two subjects often have very different concerns, attitudes, aesthetics, languages and technologies. This said, newer technology is bringing together this last aspect, and we are seeing this convergence, and it is obvious that this project is well underway.

The computer has achieved what the alchemists could not, it is a philosopher's stone dissolving subjects into its binary language. Although this presents opportunities for subject areas to interact it does not solve nor offer solutions to the fundamental languages used by the distinct fields.

The common language between photography and printmaking has been long present: the printed reproduction of photographic imagery has been critical to the development and sustenance of photography, as after all, most photographic images seen are in fact reproductions, and the number of actual photographs that even people in the field see is small compared to the number of reproduced images. Of course this commonality has grown in recent years as the 21st century philosopher's stone bringing together some of the practices of production and image making from both fields. This is the current situation for many students, artists and pedagogues: there is a technology which is bringing together our fields, a digital locus which permits us to translate images from one field's language to another and there is also a technical language which specifically covers the reproduction of photographic imagery. But this language mostly covers the overlap of the two technologies and speaks about the mechanics of its creation. It will be argued that this language is useful for describing material aspects, but it is limited.

The broader languages of photography and print most commonly diverge at the aesthetics and concerns. For example, a printmaker could explore social elements through mechanical reproduction, through the distance and lack of "aura" of the repeated image. Photography seldom considers the media of production to be politically and socially significant but more often is concerned with subject through the practices of social documentary and ethical photojournalism. Or to give another example, at a formal level printed images are often concerned with marks and often its material effect, whereas photography is concerned the luxurious distribution of tone. Of course photo-mechanical prints has some of the formal concerns in common, as does alternative photography, but for the majority of practice the paradigms are quite different.

The paper will explore this heterogeneous area, searching for a critical and visual language that can bring together aspects of the photographic image with the language of the printed image in an effort to build on the strengths of both, and question the foundations of each and the traditional separation of the areas when the technologies are bringing both together in order to facilitate communication across the subject areas.