Page 11 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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William Blake: Jerusalem - The Emanation of the Giant Albion 1804.
Blake’s 1804 illustrated poem-book Jerusalem - The Emanation of the Giant Albion is, like his earlier books, an exploration of the integration of poetry, calligraphy and illustration of a quality and spiritual coherence that echoes those of the Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts in visual and tactile qualities, yet is a personal poem, couched in Blake’s very individual cosmology and philosophy. Spiritual interpretation aside, his graphic work became an important influence on modern design, especially the psychedelic posters of the late 1960s - see Abdul Mati Klarwein, Peter Max, Victor Moscoso, Tadanori Yokoo and others. Blake marries the form of pre-print illuminated manuscripts with the slightly younger print technology of relief etching - he calls these Illuminated Books. His integrative technique - combining his hand-drawn lettering (painted in reverse on the copper plate, in an acid-resistant varnish), his figurative illustrations, and his decorative embellishments were then etched with acid, the plate inked and then surface polished, leaving an ink residue in the etched marks, then printed on a blanket etching press and the prints hand-coloured using water-colours - set an important precedent for artists in the digital age, where similar compositing is the norm.
Blake called his hand-coloured, relief-etched books ‘illuminated books’ or ‘illuminated printing’ in direct reference to the Medieval illuminated manuscripts that inspired him. In commercial letterpress printing at this time images and type-set text could only be integrated on the page by means of relief plates - woodcuts, wood or metal engravings that are mounted ‘type-high’ so that they can assembled with the metal type and printed together. This was fine for formal layouts - clearly separated text and image areas, but would not suffice to reproduce Blake’s intricately intermingled images, decorations, and calligraphic texts - his expressive visual poems. So Blake adopted the medium of relief etching, which allowed for his own hand-colouring, much as 21st century designers use a multiplicity of imaging and graphic tools (like the Adobe Creative Suite) to make a composite graphic or video. The spiritual essence of Blake’s illuminated books is of course the glue that binds the synaesthetic meaning of picture, decoration, calligraphy, ideas and imagery together in a composite whole. A century later than Blake, the Futurists and Dadaists use photomontage and half-tone reprographics to integrate images, text, and graphics together. Later in the 20th century advertisers co-opt these methods to create iconic commercial images combining photography, text, hand-drawn lettering, illustration..
These are remarkable works - the first in the 19th century to hint at the kind of complex compositing of image, text and graphics that we grew used to in the 20th century, and are now thoroughly conversant with in our digital age