Frances Robertson (2013) Print culture: technologies of the printed page, steam press to eBook Routledge

Book proposal: Revised statement December 2017 Working title: Realms of making: materialising studios, workshops and archives Summary and rationale for the project This edited volume reflects on contemporary art and design practices (such as making, collecting, curating, remediating), by presenting specific ‘local reports’ from art school environments in the UK, Europe, the US and beyond. These somewhat hidden environments do not conform to any one pattern. Indeed, the ‘art school’ shelters many complex, hidden, and diverse habitats: from attempts at the private studio ideal of the painter; through to construction workshops; shared work areas of more public, team-oriented disciplines such as Environmental Art, Product Design, or Architecture; as well as the distributed digital spaces that are now also overlaying art and design practices. All these activities have different material and sensory aspects, including, given current developments in ‘pervasive computing’, the apparently immaterial virtual sphere. The material worlds of art and design are characterised by mobility, mutability and fluidity of practices across a diversity of spatiotemporal sites. Through a rich and geographically diverse collection of chapters and shorter essays, the proposed book will investigate art schools as complex, socio-material sites of making, passing on and negotiating meanings, knowledge and objects – in a constant dialogue between the past and the present, conformity and resistance, amateurism and professionalism, apparent freedom and commercial pressures.