Observation One Serve the needs of your core publics first: Ferret fur is a pretty good indicator of printer

quality David Owens-Hill Queens University of Charlotte February 8, 2010

During my tenure as New Media Associate at McColl Center for Visual Art in Charlotte, North Carolina I was charged with assisting artists at a nonprofit residency center in all manner of electronic creation. The Center was fortunate to have invested heavily in new media technology and maintained a fully equipped Digital Media Lab complete with a 42-inch large format printer. In the winter of 2007, with a fresh crop of artists arriving for a 3 month residency a kiniblin pin broke in the Centers older large format photo printer. Astute readers will know that the kiniblin pin is not an actual item in any manufactured good, but it was the only explanation we ever came up with for the sudden death of this asset. A replacement printer, one which sales literature proclaimed to be more impressive and tactically useful for our needs was purchased and arrived just before the artists moved into their studios and was immediately pressed into service. This course of events sounds appropriate thus far: publics are promised the use of a specific piece of equipment, it breaks, the organization responsible for its upkeep replaces it. Were the case study that simple, there would be nothing to learn. Once it arrived, the new-and-improved printer proved hard to operate, prone to failure and of an inferior quality to the model it replaced. There were strategic applications that proved useful to administrative tasks (e.g.: the print width was identically sized to many internally posted way-finding graphics, posters, etc.) but the needs of the publics primarily served by the organization were not being met. A decision was made by the senior leadership team to keep this machine in service and try to make it work for the needs of the wholeessentially the needs of the artists who fulfilled the core mission of the organization would have to make concessions to the administrative

needs of the organization itself. As the staff member responsible for straddling the line between artist needs and administrative needs, I was often required to form elaborate explanations as to why the equipment couldnt simply perform as we all hoped it would. Unhappiness from the artists ensued. It was truly a compromise that satisfied no one. Whats the take-away message to this example? Simple: serve your publics. Serve them all, but pay attention to those that form the core of your mission. Had I the ability to rewrite the history of this situation, I would have worked harder to first serve the needs of the artists-in-residenceprobably through the purchase of a different piece of equipment rather than the needs of the administration. One artist, Nora Herting of New York City, was most affected by this situation. Between the daily print runs of the Centers administrative pieces, Nora and I worked for hours on end to produce a printed piece of art that was not grainy and was of gicle quality (the de facto standard for gallery displays of digital fine art). Her work, wickedly funny pieces poking fun at the traditional model of Sears Photography Studio-esque portrait sessions relied on fine detail, which was never fully accomplished. Ultimately, she decided to purchase a large format printer for her studio, at significant expense, and never used the Centers large format printer again. By ignoring the needs of our core audience we alienated one artist; one artist who represented the sole reason for the existence of the residency center.

Fig 1: Betty, Nora Herting, archival digital print, 48x20, 2007 Nora Hertings Betty became a rallying cry (in digital print form) for the printer woes that plagued the Digital Media Lab at McColl Center for Visual Art. It was the subtle gradations in flesh tone and shadow in the models arm that proved perpetually out of gamut for the printer that met the needs of half of the printers publics. Ferret fur is also a pretty good indicator of printer quality.