Electric Ink
Presentation at a session on ‘Digital Skin’ at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 9–12 May 2016. A storify of this session is available at: https://storify.com/Codicologist/digital-skin-sensory-experiences-of-medieval-manus
A favourite modern metaphor for technological change is disruption. We are encouraged to think of the appearance of new technologies as unpredictably disrupting the status quo, consigning older technologies to the rubbish heap. The rise of the networked personal computer is seen as superseding older text technologies such as the printing press, typewriter or fountain pen. But we are learning that such a linear model of technological progress is an over-simplification. The resurgence of vinyl records and persistence of the radio illustrate how patterns of technological change are more complex and prone to the vagaries of taste than a simple model of disruption and transformation suggest.
Older text technologies shape our modern digital environment more than we are aware. A few years ago, I visited the famous Japanese printing firm of Toppan in Tokyo. Toppan was established following the modernisation of Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, and pioneered the introduction of the latest German letterpress printing machines into Japan. Toppan became famous for its high-quality colour printing, such as this beautiful poster from 1915. It may seem that a specialist printing firm such as Toppan would be at risk of disruption from new digital technologies. However, the circuit boards which make our digital devices run are printed. The etching of these circuits draws on the same expertise in precision printing that makes the colour printing in this poster so effective. Toppan pioneered new technologies in the printing of circuit boards as Japan led the way in the use of miniaturised transistors in electronic products in the 1960s.
In 1965, Toppan produced for the World’s Fair in New York this miniature printed copy of the bible measuring just 4 millimetres square. It was precisely these sort of techniques that Toppan was also applying to the printing of miniaturised circuit boards. To produce colour televisions and screens, it is necessary for the colour elements in the screen to be aligned very precisely, and again Toppan’s expertise in colour printing enabled it to become a world leader in the production of colour screens. Toppan also had a long history in stereoscopic and 3D printing, and this is now enabling them to contribute to the production of virtual reality headsets.
Toppan’s experience in image processing also resulted in their working with the Vatican Library in the Cicero project which sought to recover hidden texts in palimpsests.
If we think of our computers and tablets as printed objects, which at their heart they are, then our perception of the relationship between printing and digital technologies becomes very different. The laptop becomes the apotheosis of printing, rather than its nemesis. New materials can restate our understanding of textual materialities.
Here is a postcard. It consists of card and ink; there are no electronic components. However if you put a postcard in the player machine, it will play the track named on the postcard, and you can start, stop and pause the music. This analogue object, a postcard of ink and cardboard, has become digital, controlling a music track. How? The postcard is printed using conductive ink, an ink that conducts electricity. Conductive inks have been around for a while, but have frequently contained silver compounds and other harmful chemicals. The advance made by Bare Conductive and other firms is to produce a non-toxic and solvent-free electric ink that can be used in a variety of applications.
With electric ink, you can draw a circuit. Switches can be painted on walls. You can make a music player out of cardboard and ink. You can print a newspaper in electric ink so that when you can access links by touching the printed newspapers. Paper and ink start to become powerful digital interfaces.
While digital tools have proved invaluable for exploring, comparing and making more widely available medieval manuscripts, by reducing manuscripts to images of a standard size and shape, breaking up the manuscript into a series of screen-sized snapshots, the manuscript is stripped to its bare bones, robbed of everything that gives the manuscript’s body shape and character. No matter how far we try to represent different aspects of the physical structure of the manuscript, it is never more than a skeuomorphic ghost of the original object.
However, new materials like conductive ink challenge these distinctions. When ink becomes digital, it transforms our view of the binary distinctions between analogue and digital. For many years, it has been possible to produce extraordinarily high quality facsimiles of medieval manuscripts, as a glance around the book stalls at this congress will show. Imagine a facsimile of a manuscript produced with electric ink. When I worked with Kevin Kiernan on the Electronic Beowulf in the 1990s, we knew that using the digital edition would be nothing like handling the original manuscript, no matter how much detailed imaging of the manuscript was undertaken. But the digital version enabled images of letters in the manuscript hidden by conservation work, faded letters and so on to be made readily available. But handling the online version bears little relationship to handling the original manuscript. However, with the use of conductive inks, we could imagine a facsimile which replicates the weight, size and feel of the original, but could incorporate links to images of hidden letters and other relevant materials.
Elaine Treharne has forcefully reminded us that among ‘the most important drawbacks to the digital are the untheorized fragmentariness of the digital realm, and its lack of what William James calls ‘extensity’; that is, we only see the manuscript in a perspectival and partial quality — what can be described as ‘transcendence,’ following Merleau-Ponty’. Elaine contrasts this ‘disembodied isolation’ with the importance of what she calls the plenitext in the manuscript volume itself — ‘the words, the images, the spaces, the folios, the quires, the binding and all other aspects of the material make-up of the book or fragment or leaf’.
Electric ink is a new experimental product which has only so far been used in a limited range of situations, but nevertheless it challenges that view that the digital is necessarily disembodied and transcendent. As one of the craft components of the plenitext of the manuscript potentially becomes digital, electric ink encourages us to reconsider our assumptions about the distinction between digital and analogue and suggests a re-engagement with the material representation of the manuscript. In a limited way, electric ink offers a glimpse of the possibility of incorporating in our representation of medieval manuscripts what Elaine calls the immanent perspective, including the full bodyweight and fleshiness of the book or document: not being satisfied with the text/image-focused transcendent perspective.
Similarly, electric ink reminds us that in studying manuscripts it is also vital to have a strong dialogue with creative and artistic practice. Elaine has pointed out the importance of the arts and crafts movement in encouraging awareness of the manuscript as a craft object. The calligraphy of pioneers such as Edward Johnston helped shape modern approaches to palaeography and manuscript studies. Likewise, a lively dialogue today with artists woking with new materials can help us in ameliorating the disembodiment of the digital. I was introduced to the possibilities of conductive ink by the curator and writer Bronac Ferran, who told me about the remarkable work of the distinguished artist Eduardo Kac of the Chicago Institute of Art. Eduardo has been a pioneer of many new forms of art and poetry, using a variety of media ranging from typewriters, fax and minitel to holograms, bioart and even aromapoetry. It is wonderful that Eduardo has joined us here in Kalamazoo this morning to explain something of his work.
In his work, Lagoglyph Sound System, Eduardo experimented with the possibilities of using conductive ink for silk screen printing of an imaging. The result is a haptic artwork. When viewers touch the black shapes, they hear an ethereal music.
Of course, there are audio cards and touch sensors behind the image, but it is the conductive ink which turns this into a sensual and sensuous artwork.
Other artists have also experimented with the potential of conductive ink. In 2014, I helped arrange through the AHRC Digital Transformations theme a showing at the Cheltenham Science Festival of a work called Contours developed by Fabio Antinori with Bare Conductive and Alicja Pytlewska. Contours comprises three large tapestries with shapes printed on them using conductive ink. The conductive ink enables the tapestries to react to the presence of a person in their immediate vicinity and track their movement as they touch the tapestries.
As viewers interact with Fabio’s tapestries, a soundscape derived from medical data is modulated. The effect is similar to that of a medical research environment and reflects on the relationship between science and the body. Antinori states that he sees the skin-like tactile quality of the tapestries in Contours as a large-scale metaphor for the idea of breathing life into a textile skin.
Given that skin and ink are important components of medieval manuscripts, this metaphor is a beguiling one for medievalists, and I won’t linger long on it, as I want to make way for Eduardo to illustrate his varied and innovative views on the book. However, I will make one final point. In exploring new materialities of this sort, collaboration and dialogue with artists is essential. Bare Conductive, who made the inks we have seen here, is a small startup in London, run by former students of the Royal College of Art. In exploring these cross-connections, we perhaps need to look beyond conventional sources of humanities funding, and consider our relationship with the creative economy. We need the medieval manuscript to enter the world of the creative start-up. That is why I am so pleased that Emma Cayley will be concluding this session, as her work on the Exeter Book has been funded from creative economy funding streams in Britain and was featured in the 2014 Creative Economy showcase in London. Her work illustrates how seeking new materialities of the medieval manuscript will help us forge new alliances.
