"We have enormous scale and purchasing power on everything from printing costs to technological efficiencies to paper costs".
Woodblock printing, another huge technological advance, emerged around the seventh century, and movable type in the 11th, hundreds of years before Gutenberg.
It still ranks as both one of American newspapering's greatest hatchet jobs and, in this era of withering Internet competition, a relevant, revealing look at ineffective responses by print management to technological and other challenges.
"Beyond a purely aesthetic affinity, the mechanical and technological print processes connect the works conceptually in their capacity to summon the expressive, humanly gestures of abstract painting," Nahmad adds.
Commenting on their use in the film, Walker writes: Detailed instructions in relatively small print for various technological devices appear at several points in the film, the most visible of which are the lengthy instructions for the zero-gravity toilet on the Aries Moon shuttle.
Among different manufacturing technologies and technological innovations, additive manufacturing or 3D Printing is making the most significant impact.
Technological change 3D printing and robotics, for example—or the emergence of shale oil and gas as cheap forms of energy may deliver a big boost.
Indeed: in the Nineties, Knight pioneered digital image-making, retouching and printing, not only investigating technological boundaries, but blurring the line between real and fantasy.
Accordingly, this essay turns in its final section to a consideration of Chinese political culture and, particularly, its engagement with the past in the effort to illuminate why China did not respond to the introduction of printing and other major technological advances in the manner that both Chinese and Western scholars would have us believe.
