Print as Infection

Abstract

My paper will consider how to exploit print as replication within a practice that seeks to disrupt the boundaries of power and normalcy. 

Print offers a unique conceptual and material matrix of social dispersal. My paper will examine this multiplicity from the perspective of infection, where prints potential as an agent of dispersal is utilised as a code of rupture within the visual representational practices of power and normalcy. This draws upon theories of the cultural screen (Silverman, 1996) where a society’s conception of reality is defined through a shared projection of images and discourses: and the way that definitions of normal and ‘good’ exist in opposition to the ‘Other’ as dirty and foul.  I propose that a creative research practice using print ‘as copy’ can disrupt the cultural screen by inserting new representational codes to contaminate and replicate. Such disruptions offer Deleuzian slippages in the field of cultural production itself.  

 Two bodies of current research will be discussed within this framework, the colonised body and hygiene practices. The colonised body draws on my history of incarceration to use the body of the prisoner in constant replication as a form of moral saturation and inversion. I have found people perceive my past as ‘dirty’, and that it excludes me from participation in parts of the social structure. My creating copies of myself I am able to insert my representation as inmate back into the social sphere of normalcy. The second body of work I will discuss extends on this idea of purity and infection to use dust printing to distribute the remains of the subjective pain of Othering processes over the body.