[tt] [SALT] Stone ink gallery (Burtynsky talk)

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Stewart Brand <sb at gbn.org> -----

From: Stewart Brand <sb at gbn.org>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:40:04 -0700
To: salt at list.longnow.org
Subject: [SALT] Stone ink gallery (Burtynsky talk)
Reply-To: services at longnow.org


   Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent
   art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its
   Nevada mountain.  The gallery would consist of art in materials as
   durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would
   be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in
   the rolling present and the accumulating past.

   Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery,
   Burtynsky said, "because they tell us more than any previous medium.
   When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family
   photos."

   But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over
   time.  Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution.  He thought
   that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if
   it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out.
   Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon
   transfer print."  It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of
   ground stone---the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in
   Germany---and the black ink is carbon.

   On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of
   his ultra-high resolution photographs.  The color and detail were
   perfect.  Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in
   someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality.  Kept
   in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain
   unchanged for 10,000 years.  He said that making one print takes five
   days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have
   the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle ([1]link), and Cornwall.
   Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but
   Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds
   deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink
   and paper would expand and contract together.

   The rest of the presentation was of beautiful and evocative
   photographs from three demonstration exhibits for the proposed
   gallery---"Museum of the Mundane" by Vid Ingelvics; "Observations from
   a Blue Planet" by Marcus Schubert; and "In the Wake of Progress" by
   Burtynsky himself.  A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open
   pit copper mine.  A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the
   levels was pointed out: "That's a whole railroad train."  Alberta tar
   sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest.  China's Three
   Gorges Dam.  Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible.  Expired oil
   fields stretching to the horizon.  Michelangelo's marble quarry at
   Carrera, still working.

   "This is the sublime of our time," said Burtynsky, "shown straight on,
   for contemplation."  Indeed worth studying for centuries.

                                   --Stewart Brand

--

   Stewart Brand -- sb at gbn.org
   The Long Now Foundation - http://www.longnow.org
   Seminars & downloads: http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

References

   1. http://www.colorcarbonprint.com/

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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