Ghost Games 

Portal to a print pal game 

Having the basics of the DIY WeeWoodie Rembrandt press now in place, the designer turns his attention to the next phase for the PrintmakingWorld Ozine and its several small printmaking presses—defining and development of ‘Proximates: The print pals game.”

What is Proximates?

This is a social networking game made for people who do hand printmaking. Nominally it is an extension of the fine art print field, and it originated as part of my campaign to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking. The physical platform for Proximates is the small printing presses I began designing ten years ago—the Halfwood Press as it is known.

These presses took several shapes and attracted hundreds of people. A couple years ago I got the idea to go back in time to the original designs of etching presses and I made mini-version of the press Rembrandt probably used to make his famous (and, also, infamous) prints. I named it the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press.

Around five years ago I introduced the concept for an interactive game to go along with my campaign to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking. Printmaking is the ancestor of all media technologies and, for that matter, all technologies that depend on communication of exactly repeatable images by mechanical means.

In the age of digital communication, all of history that was limited to mechanical reproduction in the past—picture books, diagrams, magazines, etc.—took flight to the Internet. It was quite soon that people invented games to play on computers. The combination of printmaking with digital devices gave us so-called “digital prints” and expanded artists’ means of expression and communication.

However, despite the interest in and purchases of our Halfwood Presses, my goal—restoration of the cultural value of printmaking—eludes me because people are not aware of the creative possibilities of the act of printmaking. The creative act of making printing plates, preparing to print them, and pulling the prints is hindered by its connection to institutionalized printmaking. The way in which printmaking is defined as a “fine art” gives printmaking a mistaken identity.

When people think of visual arts, common sense tells them this means painting and the graphic arts; printmaking is lumped together with other visual arts regardless of the unique ways in which printmaking evolved. From playfully or ritually-made handprints on the walls of caves in prehistory evolved the invention of means by which intentionally made, exactly repeated images can record their own making and doing and—given the right materials—the act of creation may transcend hundreds and thousands of years.

If you look at an image of the handprints on today’s computer screen or on your mobile device, consider that you are seeing 30,000 years of printmaking but that it is also a moment in time, an almost immediate result of an act of human creativity. Whether those handprints are “serious” images (like their adjacent paintings of animals and human figures) or the result of idle play or entertainment we will never know.

I choose to think they are acts of creativity and mechanical experimentations with pigments and spray methods and so I associate printmaking with performance and creativity. Leaping through time and space, today my “game” I call Proximates is intended to underscore the actions of human creativity with transcending time and space—not only as a kind of painting and drawing that can be replicated for commercial profits.

It is particularly for young people who, from the ages of 2 to 18 years, are learning what they will need to know to understand their own potential in helping Earth’s human life sustainability. I refer to children all over the world who can connect to the Internet by computer, smart phone or tablet device if they learn how to print with a press.

Therefore I invented Proximates; lately my wife suggested I call it “Print Pals” after the old “Pen Pal” arrangements of our youth. My goal—to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking—will be assisted by developing Proximates as part of all the presses I design.

How it works

People schooled in institutionalized and commercial fine art prints have been taught to follow a system of edition numbers which was invented early in the 20^th Century as a marketing tool. Publishers and art dealers meant to capitalize on the rarity aspect of one-of-a-kind paintings and drawings. Rarity is valued among wealthy people because a rare object, such as a huge diamond or old master painting is tantamount to economic and political power. It is easy to shift this factor to equate to cultural value because such rare and beautiful things as works of art have inherent cultural value, too, if they convey something of the person, the people, the materials and times involved in their making.

Also, the printing plates change because of the wear and tear of printing which, in the sales pitch of the publisher and art dealer, means there are variations in the print equal to deterioration. Therefore, print number one is “better” than print number 100. The numerals, 1/100 written on the print gives it a higher economic value. These edition numbers are as good as gold, therefore. Art is thus reduced to the level of plain metal; the act of human creativity that might have inspired the original print is lost as the print might be equal to the value of a gold Krugerrand coin. In this sense, power becomes the basis of the art, and the cultural value of the “fine art print” becomes—as Walter Benjamin described it—political.

Therefore, I reject the system of edition numbers and, instead, replace it with a time-and-space number I call the “moment number.” The moment number is in two parts: The moment in time that the print was pulled (within a minute in the 24-hour clock system) and, the second part, the space on the Earth where it was printed, expressed in degrees latitude and longitude.

The moment number is the basis for Proximates: The print pals game.