Used in text 7A2-I, the words “Printed” (second sentence of the fir...

Text 7A2-I  

    If we believe that our own information age is defined by the digital structures of electronic communication, we must take early modern culture as inextricably bound to the medium of print. Printed text and image arose within a few years of each other in the mid-fifteenth century, credited to the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who seemingly drew together a series of extant yet disparate technologies into a new machine that could print several thousand sheets a day. The ancient oil or wine press, the goldsmith’s craft in fine metal carving, the late-medieval development of plentiful rag paper, and the recent formulation of more stable oil-based inks enabled Gutenberg’s ‘revolution’.

    Similarly, early photography developed from a coming together of two otherwise disparate technologies: on the one hand, the pinhole camera through which capture a refected view of the world as an image, and on the other the chemical means to fix the effects of light exposure on paper. In both cases, these technologies shared aesthetic resources with other media available at the time, while also producing forms of representation that were uniquely theirs, and which offered access to new ways of seeing, and enabled new forms of subjectivity. The greatly expanded flow of visual information facilitated by these technological breakthroughs worked to quicken the circulation of knowledge, and the foundations of thought itself.

Genevieve Warwick and Richard Taws. After Prometheus:

Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. In:

Art History – Journal of the Association of Art Historians.

Special Edition: Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe. p. 201 (adapted)