What could I do?

My printing company told me that they were getting rid of their old camera rig, so they won't be able to shoot my pages the old fashioned way anymore.  Can you believe it?  Technology which has been with us since the beginning of the century is about to vanish!  No more lenses and film.  No more enlargers and salt smelling photographic chemicals.  All replaced by the clean whisper and hum of digital machines in cases of grey and white plastic.  All clearly designed to take place in the future.

It's amazing to me, film going away like that.  A golden age passing into memory all around us while we watch.  Movies in the cinema will soon be shot on tomorrow's wonderful video cameras.  It's not far off!  Given the current rate of technological advancement, digital hardware capable of shooting and storing cinema quality motion picture images in real time is only a decade and a half away at the most.  And then this age will truly be over.  Photo sensitive chemicals stuck on strips of plastic?  To record images?  Unimaginable!  How must it have been to have lived back then. . !  One hundred years of film!  Goodbye Chaplin!  Goodbye cluttered high school photo studios!  Never another dark room!  What will children think to see images of people chewing their lips, dipping sheets of paper into chemical baths in dark closet rooms under red light, waiting to see if the killer's face will materialize.  What will they think?

Well, I like to put dots in my artwork.  Newspaper grey tones.  When it comes to black & white artwork, I think adding tonal levels of some sort can make all the difference in the world.  Especially with my work, which tends to be rather heavy on the detail.  Without tone, the line images in T&K tend to collapse into unreadable tangles.  Tone gives them separation.  Depth.

The problem though, (and this caught me in a way which felt somewhat like a personal attack), is that while the new computer technology is impossibly flexible and miraculous, the one thing you absolutely cannot use a computer to do is scan artwork which has been plastered with little dots.  Unfair!  —When you have sheets of artwork covered with areas of perfect, uniform dots being scanned by machines which see and think in grids of perfect, uniform dots, you wind up with conflict.  Strange patterns emerge which make it look as though I've laid down plaids and paisleys where there were supposed to be even greys.  Dots are no longer perfectly round and uniform, but jaggy and unclean.  In short, everything looks yucky.

The answer?  Stop sticking tone down.  Stop scanning it.  —Instead, generate it.

Scan the raw line work into the computer and then pretend there are dots.  Pretend, by using hyper advanced software and stupidly expensive computerized machines.  Don't send artwork to the printing company.  Send computer disks!  So many advantages!

Sigh.

As contrary as it may sound, I really enjoy tinkering around with computers and electronics.  I can count to a million using colours!  (Though the skill of reading colour bands on electronic resistors is also becoming hopelessly dated, thanks to surface mount technology.  Smaller!  Smaller!).

I admire what computers can do, and I am excited, if somewhat awed, by the prospects of the digital age so young upon us.  —The first video games came out when I was only seven, and they were a wonderful kind of magic.  But I will always love mechanical things; machines which human eyes and human hands and brains were designed through evolution to touch and see and understand.  Once a machine starts to function on levels invisible or too small to see, you slip into the realm of the theoretical.  And while the ability to theorize makes us very strong, I have always found that I'm most comfortable in places where I can see.  Seeing is believing.

But I'll not be holding film up to the light any more.