The electrophotographic reproduction process: An archaeology of the invention and the relevance in the artistic practices with new media

Abstract

[EN] In the current culture it is almost impossible to imagine a context without technology flooding everything, without the Internet as a connection network that brings the here and now closer to an endless present. A world where constant information, technological development and the distribution of mass communications place humans in an instant of immediate experience. In this context, saturated and surrounded with information and therefore with images, an Iconosphere (Cohen-Séat, 1959), which continuously grows. In the age of mass communication, it seems natural that digital facts are based on strategies that include montage, combination, transformation, remix and loop (Prada, 2009, p. 120). The image that inhabits this space is a copy, an itinerant, freely distributed, compressed, decompressed, reproduced, which often results in mediocre quality (Steyerl, 2014). The image is transformed, sacrificing its original quality and aura for the sake of accessibility. Similarly, art is dominated by its artistic forms, which can be produced, modified or transmitted through digital technologies. Many seem to believe that this moment has been reached circumstantially, without any correspondence with another analogical and material past. However, thanks to an inventor, Marcel Demeulenaere (1901-1987), there is a past that connects it and makes some paradigmatic changes in art possible, specifically those germinated from the artistic use of an automatic machine of graphic multi-reproduction, commonly known as the photocopy machine. Understanding the relevance of the Belgian inventor and engineer, Marcel Demeulenaere, and the invention of his procedure, procédé de photographie sans développement (a process for making photographs without development), begins by considering the different advancements that emerged in the technical field of reproduction and the context that nurtured it. Additionally, it also seeks to reveal the artistic practices developed with this procedure.