The history of Impact

Impact 1999

Impact Multi-disciplinary Printmaking Conference series Impact Conference originated at the Centre for Fine Print Research and was hosted at UWE in 1999 in association with the Royal West of England Academy and the Southern Graphics Council USA. The conference was attended by over 400 delegates from more than 20 countries with presentations of academic papers, workshops, print process demonstrations, exhibitions and lectures on a multitude of contemporary and historical print practice.

Conference proceedings from the first Impact Conference Proceedings are available in hard copy or on CD-Rom, edited by Carinna Parrama

http://www.uwe.ac.uk/amd/cfpr/impdata.htm

The Cerebral Versus the Retinal in Printmaking

The following article is a section from a key note address titled "In Praise of Neglected Printed Histories" presented by Beauvais Lyons, from University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA) at the IMPACT Conference, Bristol, United Kingdom, September 22-25, 1999.
http://www.clt.astate.edu/elind/sagaarticleBLyons.htm

Impact 2001

2nd International Printmaking Conference
University of Art & Design, Helsinki

http://www2.uiah.fi/conferences/summeracad/impact/

2nd IMPACT is an important conference on the art of printmaking. As to its content, the conference discusses the relationship between traditional craftsmanship and modern technology; the basic working methods that are thousands of years old meet the present day image editing. Photography is part of printmaking since its birth. It is indeed hard to even imagine contemporary printmaking without the marriage of photography with the hand made print. 2nd IMPACT is however not only interested in raising issues concerning the technical aspects of printmaking, but intends also to deal with some relevant questions of content from a Northern and Nordic perspective. Art on paper, paper as a surface to print on - the space of paper - are the collective theme of 2nd IMPACT . Printmaking is a form of expression in progress.

Impact 2003:

Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town
in collaboration with the Rhodes University School of Fine Art, South Africa

It looks like the website is gone but it is available (very slowly) on the web-archive site here

"The previous two Impact International Printmaking Conferences have focused on the impact of technology on creative and conceptual developments in print media. Whilst this issue has importance to printmaking, the discourse around conceptual developments and theory that has taken place in contemporary practice has to a large extent been overlooked. It is the aim of this conference to explore the impact of recent conceptual and theoretical developments in contemporary practice on printmaking and map their influence on contemporary print culture.

Working Proof: The impact of prints in a social, political and cultural context

• Frontiers. Notions of exploration, boundaries and limits. The dissolution of boundaries between printed art and other media and the redefinition of new parameters.
• Conflict. Ideas of opposition and hostility reflected in printed art. The cultural hegemony of prints from the western world
• Repackaging. Looking back at notions of history, identity, race and gender through a contemporary re-interpretation of the past in prints. Towards developing a new print language in a post-colonial context.
• Traces. Looking at the traces of historical events in contemporary culture and print media, and about the ways that history is produced through the recognition of such traces. Possible areas of interpretation might include relics, ruins, monuments and memorials; the found object; histories of recording and the discourses of history, archaeology, and genealogy.
• Exile. Notions of marginalisation through political and cultural isolation, but also arrival and departure that evokes thought of exile. Possible areas of interpretation could include corruption; prison islands, military experiment, social engineering, encampments and states of siege; discourses of first contact; home and homesickness; longing and belonging."

there is a conference exhibition here http://www.uwe.ac.uk/amd/cfpr/impdata.htm