The computer graphics image “Costa Rica” by Bill Davison is based on an interaction between older techniques and modern technology. Davison creates screenprints which are combined with digital artifacts.
When working in “syncopation” with a computer, there are an infinite number of permutations for any one constructed image. As an artist prone to extensive deliberation about predicting the consequences of choices, electronic technology has allowed me, when necessary, to invent in more spontaneous, intuitive and automatic ways. A bondage of sorts to lengthy trial and error procedures is eliminated. The multiple and rapid visualization possibilities a computer can offer do not, however, circumvent intellectual decisions, but rather expedite, in a different media, traditional investigative methods.
The screenprints I have generated from computers have almost exclusively involved the alteration and deconstruction of photographs, primarily snapshots of my domestic and natural environment. The printed objects present this “artificial and disguised reality” juxtapositioned with transferred images of traditional photographic narration and anti-illusionistic areas of sensuous and physical presence. Using a format of stacked, layered or aligned sectors, the intention is to establish a “field” that reveals choices and ambiguities through systems of logic, whimsy and pictorial content.
Realization of the completed screenprints involves the use of contemporary electronic systems and fundamental printmaking equipment. The following procedures are typical of a working sequence:
Images of props—fishing lures, metal fragments, lace, duckwings, any objects with personal meaning, but most often photographs are digitized by a computer and then altered significantly using various menu commands for color, size and location changes, as well as random super-imposition. Nine different scanned images are made with new props but with similar commands, and individually saved for the next manipulation process.
Various sections from each of these “pages” are retrieved and woven together until intuition, rather than a pre-established scheme, determines an acceptable collage of the now non-objective phenomena.
An image recorded 35mm slide of the monitor picture is then laser scanned to produce much enlarged, colour separated halftones, appropriate for photo-screenprinting.
After another photo-mechanical conversion, the electronically generated image,“the artificial and disguised reality”, is printed on archival paper, followed by the printing (in halftone) of a “traditional photograph” and the solid “anti-illusionist areas”. The surface is then made complete, “sensuous and physical”, by the application of rayon fibres to a selected rectangular shape.
The strategy finally, is to construct — by the interaction of older procedures with very recent technologies — provocative screen printed images that combine digitised artefacts with my personal signature marks. (Bill Davison)

Technical background:

Costa Rica, 1989
Hw: Computergenerated slides / Lightspeed Color Layout System

Umbria, 1989
Hw: Computergenerated slides / Lightspeed Color Layout System

Thicket, 1989
Hw: Computergenerated slides / Lightspeed Color Layout System

Bill Davison was born in 1941 in Burlington, Vermont, U.S.A. He obtained his B.A. degree in 1963 from Albion College, Albion, Michigan, and graduated to a M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1966. Currently Bill Davison is Professor of Art at the University of Vermont in Burlington.