Shutting down the printmaking world?

I got a bill today for $60, which included an overdue payment of $25 because I let my registration fee for printmakingworld.com lapse. It’s one more indication that I am not cut out for management of Internet accounts. It’s another reason I look forward to being free of these administrative tasks—the kinds of things that other people are very good at doing because they are not trying to reinvent printmaking or any such thing like it.

In fact, I have heard that I am paying way too much for domain registrations—that I could get the same service for about $10 a year! If that’s true, then I wish I had known that three years ago when I got printmakingworld.com. I would be money ahead, that’s for sure. As I am reinventing printmaking—taking the 20^th Century printmaking world and re-shaping it to fit the 21^st Century world and future printmakers’ education today—I don’t have the inclination to stop what I’m doing today to shop around for and reorganize my Websites accordingly.

In that light, $60 is a small price to pay for the freedom to continue working on the Print Maker Faire for next year—the first of its kind in the printmaking world. By next year, when I get notice that the domain name, printmakingworld.com, is up for renewal, I will not care because the decision to keep it or let it go will not be mine alone. It will be a matter for the Factory School of Printmaking Art to decide.

Looking ahead

It is my disposition to always be looking ahead and thinking about the future. I think about trends and forecasts. While it’s true that no one knows the future, it is also true that anyone can look at probabilities and make a pretty good guess as to what will happen based on past experience and probabilities.

For example, if you don’t watch your expiration dates on domain name registration at your ISP Website, or have turned off auto renewal, the probability is pretty good that—amid the exciting prospects of a Print Maker Faire—you will forget to renew and you will probably have to pay if you’re not ready to let the domain go.

But when you’re alone on a quest for a redefined and better printmaking world, you have to do the best you can with what you have and—if you overlook putting it on your calendar—then you will pay the costs. Life is like that when you are reinventing something as big as the printmaking art world.

Downsizing

Since 1994, when I set up my first Web site, I have initiated and used about twenty domain names, with varying sizes of files and varying purposes. As this period coincides with the rise of the persistent virtual worlds and the massively multiplayer online role-playing games, my goal was to create something like these virtual worlds where printmaking was the main thing.

Every time a new proposition would come to mind, it would generate a new Web site. The last one I added was oprintmaker.com, which was inspired by a service called odesk.com, a kind of help desk for contractors. This site serves contractors and freelancers of all kinds—writers, artists, designers, it-specialists, programmers—every kind of specialist in the world who could do for you what you need to have done.

Oprintmaker.com was a service for printmakers who, for example, would be willing to print an edition of, say, 50 prints from an etching plate a printmaker had made. Or, someone might want 200 Wedding invitations printed from a family heirloom engraving and this person could advertise this on oprintmaker.com. Somewhere in the world, there would be someone who could produce the invitations. Oprintmaker.com made its money by charging a service fee that covered things like contractual agreements, etc. It’s a commonplace in the publishing industry already, with companies like amazon.com’s CreateSpace and others.

I registered the name almost a year ago; I will let it expire or, if a team develops around the Print Maker Faire project, offer it to someone on the team to develop into a full-blown service for printmakers worldwide and the general public. It is, after all, unlikely that the name, oprintmaker.com, is hot property. Also, someone else might come up with a better name for it; or, there is already a company doing this!

At the Faire

Custom hand-printers are very rare nowadays. In the Seattle area, for example, I know of only one, which is Sidereal Press owned by Sheila Coppola. In Portland, Oregon, there is Mark Mahaffey. It would be my hope that both would be at the Print Maker Faire launch next July. They are not what the “maker” movement is about—which is like a grass-roots movement of small, independent people doing hobby and crafts for pleasure and entertainment—but more like the 20^th Century model of industrial-grade fine art.

Printmaking has always been at the top of the brainstem of media arts. Printmaking is where industry meets social and cultural demands. We point to Gutenberg as the quintessential representation of industry meeting the needs of a public, resulting in a far-reaching revolution in every aspect of Western history. He borrowed idea of moveable type—invented in Korea—invented a way to organize re-usable type blocks in a holder (called a chase), and changed the world forever. Prior to that, printmaking was for entertainment and illustrating the canonical principles of the day.

The Print Maker Faire is a grass-roots, small affair for print collectors, hobbyists, teachers, crafters, students and entrepreneurs and it will include representation by major service providers like Sidereal Press and Mahaffey Fine Arts. The former representation is important because it shows the work of little kids and “big kids” in one place at one time. More importantly, the Print Maker Faire is intended to show how extensible printmaking art can be.