180627 Escape Rembrandt’s Press 

I wrote Rembrandt’s Ghost in the New Machine as one asset to add to funding the International Print Center & Incubators – IPCI, Inc. – an S-corp, or Benefit Corporation. Writing it was partly a response to my older idea of the teacher in a box. PressGhost was the incarnation of that concept. It’s all about education, after all.

But education is not a good business. It’s not that the U.S. marketplace is big on education now. Peter Bloom wrote Closing of the American Mind about the time I was being pressed out of my teaching job at the University of Washington.

A good teacher, however, will not roll over dead just because the establishment kicks him out of their club lounge. A good art teacher, too, will not go along with the herd if he or she has dug deep into the meaning of the cultural arts. I teach creativity, and by inventing ways to connect an art tool (or instrument) to the cultural arts, I walk my talk.

I put my mind to designing the Mini Halfwood Press, then I put my mind in it, i.e., the PressGhost.

My research in printmaking (and this does not apply to its cousins, painting, drawing and sculpture) showed the stronger side of its value: technology. Its cousins in photography, film, video and digital-based systems are more important to education.

Thus, I built on a base of artists’ relationship to people through media such as photographs (of art), cinema, video and digital art. Add to this performance skill and it sums up to what I do, which is gaming.

It is not consumer-type games I do, however, but e-games, which are educational games in the guise of entertainment.

As I write this I am practicing my playing of the game I named, Emeralda: Games for the Gifts of Life. I call it practice, but I’m also producing an essay, words for the culture I learned in college, the life of the mind.

Having exceeded my allotment in years, three-score and ten—I move toward the end of my life in the cultural arts. Its highest level of attainment in education is through the channels of media, and the interface is business exchange—commerce being the oldest form of valuation.

I can think of no better means to teach than by commerce, and this includes the incorporation of buyers and sellers into a mutually beneficial relationship. Corporations have provided the structural means to make the relationship happen. It begins with shareholders in the enterprise and includes the consumers who prove and sustain the value of the enterprise. It’s a recursive relationship that works.

An etching press with a brain, or a teacher in a box, can be a product to sustain interaction and mutual benefits but not if its purchase stops at the old frame of reference, i.e., making prints for consumption. That’s because on that level, prints are the same as paintings and drawing but cheaper.

Continuous interaction between maker and consumer is where printmaking trumps its cousins, painting and drawing because printmaking has cousins in technology, too, and this makes all the difference.

Therefore, IPCI is a corporation; but because IPCI is a cultural arts corporation, it may fall under the S-corp or B-corp mantel—Service and Benefit. My only means to finance the startup is my name to those who know my name is as a teacher and artist. It’s likely I’m better at teaching than I will ever be as an artist; time will tell, and we don’t have any more of it.

What is apparent immediately is that I have a thousand unsold works of art in our storage – works of art which will be disposed of as trash soon after I die. But it doesn’t have to be that way. These thousand works can be used for shares in IPCI, Inc., sold as scrip to finance the incubators (the second “I” in IPCI for which IPCI is unique in all the world).

For it is not only for making prints as consumer products that I have spent my life, but also for the benefit of the Earth’s human life sustainability and that, in turn, is educational benefit.