A Circuitous History of Print

Digital information technology is said to be bringing about the death of print. But the circuit boards that run that digital technology are themselves printed. The inventor of the printed circuit board developed the technology by spending weeks on end in the library of the British Museum, London, studying the history of etching, engraving, and lithography. How can we negotiate this contradiction in the stories we tell about the history and significance of printmaking? In this lecture, Jennifer L. Roberts, the Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, traces the development of the printed circuit board and considers its many surprising intersections with the long history of fine-art printmaking, from 16th-century etching to 20th-century screenprinting.
This lecture is part of the Getty Workshop “New Approaches to the Field of Early Modern Works on Paper,” which confronts and reassesses how scholars, curators, and educators make collections of early modern drawings and prints accessible, provocative, and relevant to larger multidisciplinary conversations in the 21st century. This program is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through the Paper Project initiative.