Wuon-Gean Ho

My doctoral research is concerned with capturing tacit knowledge in relief printmaking processes. I am looking at habits, gestures and fine motor movements made by professional and highly skilled artist printmakers in the process of making a print. Tacit knowledge is fundamental to successful completion of printmaking tasks, but is often unarticulated, often unquantified and often unknown to the professional themselves. Tacit knowledge involves an anticipation of problems before they occur, and is reliant upon a multi-modal reading of the physical and material situation: using haptic, auditory and visual feedback for example. The study of movement and gestures in printmaking has been greatly supplemented with moving image and sound capture, so my research has been using slow-motion film capture and stereo-sound recordings in order to develop new insights into the motivations of gesture and movement.