Three and a Half Years...
World Printmakers was conceived in the year 2000 as an online magazine, gallery and resource center for fine-art printmakers and print lovers. Back then, when I was younger and even foolisher, I even ventured to draft a definition of a "fine-art print." As I remember, I actually did two, one more poetic, the other more scientific. In either case, World Printmakers was a site exclusively about hand-pulled, signed-and-numbered, limited-edition prints, whether etchings, lithographs, relief prints, screen prints or whatever. That was well and good then, but things have changed substantially in the past six years. In that brief and interminable period the world of the image has completed what Mamta Herland calls its "shift to digital," and this shift is having a profound influence on fine-art printmaking.

Besides the aforementioned traditional printmaking media, artists both young and old now have access to some fascinating new digital tools: the computer, the scanner, the digital printer and the Internet, all of which are playing a major role in forging the future of the fine-art print-or whatever you want to call it. Therein lies the rub: What do you want to call it? For almost four years now World Printmakers has been laboring under the weight of a centuries-old definition of the "fine-art print." In practice this meant rejecting any work which wasn't "hand pulled."

The Edge of the Wedge
Later on we started admitting digital prints, but only those whose authors were willing to adhere to the ancient canons of the limited edition. In fact, the "limited edition" has been practically a myth, or at best a gentlemen's agreement between printmakers and collectors ever since etchers discovered that electroplating their plates with a few microns of steel would permit them to pull virtually unlimited editions!

Printmakers share the new digital tools with graphic designers, photographers, animators, illustrators, video artists, cinematographers, journalists, musicians... Due to this community of resources, all of these disciplines and many more are experiencing digital seep. They're melting into one another lasciviously, exchanging their DNA's and throwing up fascinating-and for some as frightening as a 50's science fiction film-- mutant offspring.

What Ever Happened to Peaceful Coexistence?
To lifelong printmakers it looks as if all these intruders are vying for a piece of the sacred space occupied until now by traditional printmaking. And they may be right. But must this state of affairs be regarded as a threat? Are Grünewald and Rembrandt debased in any way by the subsequent appearence of Gauguin and Picasso? I think not. Did photography replace painting? Not exactly, but it certainly took a bite out of it and left it changed forever.

The problem-if it's a problem-with digital printmaking is that, being made up solely of bytes of information, it overlaps with everything else in the burgening digital world. An example of this phenomenon is the digital manipulation of photographs to create "digital prints," a procedure which is now entering into the printmaking mainstream thanks to pioneering work by artists like Mel Strawn, Ken Kerslake and Dot Krause in the U.S.A. In fact, this seemingly unlikely marriage of printmaking and photography was foreseen many years ago when the U.S. Library of Congress established its "Department of Prints and Photography," without bothering to distinguish clearly one from the other. If that slippery, amorphous and promiscuous criterion is good enough for the august Library of Congress, it's certainly good enough for us.

Some people see these changes as a tragedy, the bastardization of "pure printmaking," others see them as an opportunity. Will we soon be seeing "prints" with music and animation displayed on monitors hung over our fireplaces?

The Image is the Thing
So, whether it's acid burned on a copper plate, etched by light on silver halide crystals or materialized virtually out of a digital algorithm, it seems that the image is the thing. These reflections arose recently when I discovered on the Web the images of a young man who calls himself "Kilfish." He is quick to point out, that this nickname has nothing to do with murdering fish; rather it's a reference to Kilgore Trout, the wise and lovable, if notoriously unsuccessful science fiction writer who populates several of Kurt Vonnegut's wonderful novels.

Kilfish is a 31-year-old artist from Budapest, Hungary. His principal art is website design, but he also creates images, unusual, disquieting digital images. He doesn't call them "digital prints" or even "prints." He refers to them, somewhat ingenuously, as his "pictures." As soon as I saw them I thought, "This is the sort of creative images we need more of on World Printmakers, but they're not prints, they're, well, 'pictures.'" Then it hit me, the foolishness and small mindedness of that whole fine-art-print tempest in a bell jar.

The Heart of the Matter
I sent Kilfish an e-mail and invited him to send along some of his pictures. At the end of the day it is clear to me that the essential ingredients of a fine-art print are neither copper plates nor wood blocks nor computers, but a hand, an eye and a generous measure of creativity, without which no print can justify itself.

So World Printmakers is off on a new departure. We're opening the creaky old city gates to the lusty barbarians who are coming down from the north armed with digital drawing tablets, scanners, inkjet printers and, most lethal of all, feral fresh ideas. Even so, we suspect the sun will still come up tomorrow.