Skip to content
Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00645
- Thesis Title
- Copy Art Histories: The emergence of the photocopy machine in the 20th century art and its role as Historical Media Art. Tendencies and thematic cartography of Copy Art
- Author
- Beatriz Escribano Belmar
- E-mail
- Beatriz.escribano AT uclm.es
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Cum Laude
- Year
- 2017
- Number of Pages
- 1178
- University
- University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
- Thesis Supervisor
- José Ramón Alcalá Mellado
- Supervisor e-mail
- JoseR.Alcala AT uclm.es
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Language(s) of Thesis
- Spanish/English
- Department / Discipline
- Art Department
- Copyright Ownership
- Beatriz Escribano Belmar
- Languages Familiar to Author
- Spanish
- URL where full thesis can be found
- Keywords
- Historical Media Art, Media Archaeology, Media Art, Electrography, Copy Art
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- The main purpose of this Doctoral Thesis is to answer the hypothesis, which states that artistic practices coming from the artistic use of technologies based on [re]production, transmission and automatic image printing processes, mainly of the automatic machine of graphic multi-production –commonly known as photocopy machine–since its emergence in the sixties, are part of the historical roots of Media Art –especially with the artistic practices that used video and computer–, sharing from its particular physicity some of the main parameters and giving rise to an artistic movement called Copy Art. An artistic movement in which the photocopy machine was a gravitational centre during more than thirty years and different geographical contexts.
To this end, this research aims to review, re-contextualize and write some of the stories of these artistic practices, but looking to rethink the purely technical nature with which they were addressed before. Trying to consider that artistic and conceptual character that allows to value its transcendence and historical-artistic effect. For this study, analysis and revaluation, it is used and adopted the Media Archaeology as methodological approach, which offers the accurate positioning to investigate, study and theorize about it.
Taking this approach, it is necessary to review the evolution of reproduction processes to understand their importance and revolution within that line of development, the functional characteristics which gave rise to the graphic language, to identify the creative uses of this technology, the artistic and cultural parameters of the creation, besides doing a deep and exhaustive study of the artistic movement in which this machine constituted the gravitational center. For the latter, the story is focused on its protagonists in order to build the "micro-stories" of the artistic movement and its peculiarities. The type of artist, the type of creative process, the artwork features, the way of dissemination, up to a research, and detailed description of the cartography of the Third Generation of Copy Art artists. For the first time, this topic is addressed through a thematic cartography focused mainly on Europe and the Third Generation of artists, which was the one that put an end to this movement with the arrival of digital.
This Thesis proposes a new point of view that could explain certain phenomena or artistic paradigms of current art that were already manifest from the materiality of the artistic use of the analogical and digital photocopy machine.