181225 As I gaze at my Facebook friends’ names 

Via the algorithms that Facebook programmers have made into a birthday video, and a growing list of birthday wishes I keep on an Excel spreadsheet, I gaze at my desktop screen and think about Facebook as a “work of art.”

This “artwork” is needed to conserve resources. Facebook has saved energy and resources by being a digital way of crossing the space and time that separates us. Facebook is a work of art created by tens of thousands of programmers, stockholders and, yes, spies and hackers.

Facebook is an artwork of greater influence and control than any artwork of the past – even greater than Hollywood blockbusters and video games.

Facebook works because it aims directly to the part of the human brain that controls the masses – the nucleus accumbens, seat of hope and envy. There are few other human creations that command as many human beings’ actions as the algorithms in the lives of people worldwide.

The downfall of mankind, if there will be one, may be hastened by the illusion that hope and envy fulfillment may come by tapping and sweeping mobile screens. Unconstrained by physical action and tangible production, human beings risk making irreversible, fatal mistakes and pass bad judgments.

However, like amazon.com, which has saved untold amounts of energy by saving people automobile trips to do their shopping, the upside of these digital artworks is to keep people in their places at the same time they exercise their hope and envy without extracting huge amounts of energy.

My hope is that a tipping point is reached soon which wakes up people to the fact that human ability to respond to the imminent collapse of Earth’s human life sustainability is coming. Our ability to respond will be decided by restoring balance between production and livelihood.

Which brings me to a case in point. If I collect the names of my Facebook friends who have tapped on their screens to send a simple, “Happy Birthday” message, then what am I contributing toward achieving the balance I seek? If I am worth anything as a sentient human being, aware of the dangers facing Earth’s life sustainability, then what am I doing to avert the risks we face?

Education is key. My hope and envy consist of learning from all this and teaching it. I have been on an educational mission since I was a teenager. To collect the names of Facebook friends and learn as much as I can about them is a step toward learning and teaching how my actions and productions may help Earth’s life sustainability.

Printmaking, I learned, is the root of all technologies and such digital artworks as Facebook and amazon are the scions of print. Like the growth tip of plants, I learned about in botany, they are the outermost reaches of the known universe of algorithms. Yet it is from the deep root of printing they came.

Producing an international printmaking center incubator and work places business, I can help achieve balance between production and livelihood.

181016 An Indian blog to remember

“I would like to go beyond the boundaries of traditional printmaking and explore more possibilities.” These are the words of Dimple B. Shah, an artist living and working in Bangalore, India. Her essay on the Top Printmaking blog was good reading for me because she captured a point about printmaking most people haven’t experienced.

Printmaking is partly a performance art. Ms. Shah knows this, and her essay brings this into focus. I sent a friend request on her Facebook page and she responded in 3 seconds! Eight-thousand miles away from Seattle, she is near enough to a computer or mobile device, which makes it possible to send a signal of recognition and appreciation.

Her essay shows she has experienced firsthand examples of what troubles human kind worldwide. The increasing pressure of over-population and inadequate resources, the political crimes leading to inequity among people and between genders and other situations which may lead to the extinction of our species.

Still she works on large-scale prints and elaborate performances. Thanks to her skills with technology, now I know about her and I have a friend – at least of the Facebook type – to think about and who gives me hope. Her wisdom and putting her action into print and forms of new, communicable technologies shines through and gives me hope.

“I would like to go beyond the boundaries of traditional printmaking and explore more possibilities,” she put in her words. I like this, but I wonder, how can I help? I am aware that traditional printmaking means the type of printmaking she has access to, and in the last five years she has added multimedia to her work.

By use of digital and video camera systems linked to the Internet, she is going beyond traditional printmaking already, either consciously or intuitively adopting art forms beyond traditional printmaking. I want to add to this a missing factor, and that is to reach back to the youth in the world. Where many young people are playing online games and other kinds of game-playing, they are missing out on printmaking.

That is because of the mentors and artists in printmaking are looking backward at the hero image of the artist. Traditional printmaking is the outcome of painters who “hijacked” technology to meet their economic needs. To make a living at painting, printmaking comes to their aid, and there it stops.

Painters I have known in positions of influence and power in institutionalized art courses tend to cut printmaking from its root, like cutting down a fruit tree to harvest the fruit instead of letting the tree grow and provide fruit season to season.

The fruits of print come from long ago. The impulse by human beings to impress their hand on the stone walls of caves and overhanging cliffs is the beginning of the use of a template to express something human, as simple as, “I was here” or “This way of making an image is easy and fun.”

It is template-use, a faster and easier and more universally-accessible way to express something. It was trivial compared to the arduous and demanding painting of a creature or symbol, but it remains as the root of all subsequent technologies because it solved the problem of high-demanding painting and drawing.

Printmaking is the root of the algorithm, simply put, a method to solve a problem. Mathematicians have elaborated on the problem-solving nature of math to yield the digital applications which have become the tools of human beings all over the world, enabling human welfare and human destruction concurrently.

Now I have completed my thought but for on remaining thing. In Bangalore it is thirteen hours later than here in Seattle, where it is 6:45 AM, Pacific Daylight time – or 0645 by the 24-hour clock. Where Ms. Shah is, Bangalore, is somewhere about 12.58 North, 77.34 East in the Global Positioning System.

From this distance we have date-stamped the beginning of the Facebook definition of “friends” at least, a mere stroke or two of a finger on a mobile screen or desktop mouse. If my idea of Proximates had been true by now, my entry of my moment number would have triggered a similar keystroke-effect and if I were printing this early in the morning, and printing, and if Ms. Shah also entered the moment number and image of her print, we would be Proximates.

By means of the TOP PRINTMAKING page it has served a similar purpose only less connected, I think, than if our meeting had been by the chance occurrence of printing at the same time but in different places. The effect is the same, however we are equally privileged to have already learned printmaking, whereas the young people of the earth can only watch.

Ms. Shah’s hopes, her message, and her work is important, and she is doing a service by telling about it in words and pictures. I think for her hopes to be realized they must reach the young people as soon as possible, and the way to go beyond the boundaries of traditional printmaking and exploring more possibilities,” is in this direction.

This will be realized by joining with programmers – the same programmers who make video games and applications like Facebook – to make Proximates a reality.