Two-and-a-half years ago, I purchased a Canon EOS 10D along with the necessary paraphernalia, including a lens, battery, memory card and camera bag. When the salesperson showed me the bill, I took a moment to recover and then joked, “Well, it was either this or a Holga.” He said “I’ll be right back,” went into the supplies area, and reappeared with a brand new Holga (value $35). “A gift,” he said. We both laughed.

His gesture was meant to be funny, but it actually made sense. Since that day, my image-taking equipment has included that digital SLR, a 30-year-old 35mm Pentax, the Holga, a 12-year-old Sony camcorder, and my 6-month-old cell phone. Each has its appropriateness in terms of subject matter, mobility, features and context.

In my most recent work, I’ve taken this assortment of choices a step further, employing and then mixing technologies from different centuries. In the last year I developed an itch to revisit mediums that I learned in art school, specifically intaglio printing. I missed the physicality of this early technology, both in the process and the final product.

At the same time, I got a new cell phone with video capability. I became addicted to shooting fifteen-second minimalist videos, emphasizing the starkness and graininess they produce. (This is not unlike the MacVision digitizer of the mid-1980s, which produced a similar kind of roughness.) Using QuickTime and Photoshop, I made numerous six or seven frame sequences that looked like low-resolution Muybridge stills. I decided that I wanted to translate these grainy frames to photo etchings.

I loved the idea that I could marry technologies from the 15th centuries with those of the 21st. But I knew that the only way I would carry out this work was at a residency. I have written before about artist residencies (CA December 2001, p. 212) outlining the benefits of immersing yourself—especially away from home—in a project for an extended period of time. In this case, a residency was additionally compelling because of the need for equipment. I had everything I required for the digital side of the work, but I needed a completely different kind of facility for the etchings.

After extensive research, I applied to Women’s Studio Workshop in upstate New York (www.wsworkshop.org). It offered the perfect combination of facilities, location (remote, but two hours away from New York City) and length of time: one month.

When I got the acceptance from WSW, my first reaction was joy, immediately followed by anxiety. How was I going to get myself up to speed in etching (which I had not done for two decades) to actually produce finished work, let alone anything of professional quality? I had less than four months before my residency was to begin.

I collected and read how-to guides and attended an intensive, two-weekend photo-etching workshop. I learned what I could expect to accomplish at my residency and what I could not. But more importantly, I learned what I wanted, and it boiled down to this: I wanted to create work of quality, and I also wanted to explore the effects of marrying high-speed technology with a slower, more reflective process.

I decided to prepare for my residency in three ways:

1) Determine what I knew I could accomplish, given my expertise in the 21st-century side of the equation;

2) Find the resources to produce the fifteenth-century components;

3) Leave the rest, i.e., “the marriage,” to serendipity, experimentation and the help of Women’s Studio Workshop.

I developed a process to make my cell phone video imagery. Briefly, here are the steps: shoot a fifteen-second video, translate the video to QuickTime, choose the frames that I like and transfer those to Photoshop. In Photoshop, convert the frames to grayscale, and edit for the best gray values that will produce the minimal look I am seeking. Create strips of the individual frames, and produce a PDF.

I would then transmit the PDF to a company with the expertise to create a negative with a mezzotint screen and, from that negative, a photopolymer etching plate. After trial and error, I found the right place: Boxcar Press (www.boxcarpress.com) in Syracuse, New York, not far from WSW. I could FTP files to Boxcar and have the plates delivered via UPS ground in one or two days. A week before my residency started, I transmitted a set of sample files to Boxcar, and specified that they be sent directly to WSW so that I could hit the ground running.