ri190331 If it doesn’t play in Africa - What’s the point?

On my wife’s birthday about seven weeks ago, I experienced a cascade of ideas in the form of ten rules to play a game I call Proximates. It’s a game which is intended to help kids and parents communicate with people all over the world using a printing press.

It’s not meant to make prints and send them by mail to “mates” around the world. It’s not like pen pals, in other words (although it’s not ruled out).

This game uses a printing press and the Internet to share a moment in space and time – or space/time. The time is easily shared on the Internet because every word, image or sound is date-stamped according to the exact nanosecond the return key is hit.

Space, however, is not shared. No two physical bodies can occupy the same space at any moment. The report, however, of what somebody did at the moment can be shared. If not the exact moment in time, then the approximate moment – and the word approximate gave me the name for this game - Proximates.

Following is a list of rules I made up on my wife’s birthday:

1.       Download the Martin press

2.       Print the Martin press

3.       Download the Rembrandt’s ghost plate

4.       Print the plate 3D or laser engrave on acrylic or etch with silitransfer

5.       Prepare paper, ink and ink the plate

6.       Print the plate and moment number-it

7.       Make a digital image of the print

8.       Register the print in Proximates

9.       Mat, frame and sell the print

10.   Send for your badge of achievement.

About six weeks after this, I happened to begin corresponding with a woman in Africa. This happened by a chance occurrence (as many of the best things – and worst things – happen. I encountered her because of a shared moment of admiration for Peter Tabichi, winner of the 2019 Global Teacher Prize. She noticed my comment on Facebook where I saw the announcement.

She plans to come to Seattle, so she contacted me. For the next five days we exchanged many emails – sometimes twice daily! To me, it was an experience of Proximates, a shared moment of homage to Father Tabichi which led to exchanges of information.

It was not printmaking that brought us to exchange valuable information, but it could have been if my old dream of Proximates – The Printmaking Game – had achieved traction.

It’s not over. In fact, I’m almost playing Proximates in my correspondence via email with Rewana (that’s her name). She has sent me pictures, just as I imagined kids would send pictures in Proximates. Grownups, too, exchange images of their prints. I have been doing this for over a decade through my design of Halfwood Presses.

My friend in Africa is not a printmaker – she is a business woman, the CEO of a farming co-operative. What we have in common is teaching and training by any means we can in our domains-of-expertise the improvement of human and other lives.

Our focus is on bees, as her group is expanding their offering to the world market for foodstuffs. Already they produce cereals, pork, beef, vegetables and fruits. They produce honey and her goal is to expand her outlets including the Arab and American markets.

My version of Proximates plays out this way. It’s an educational experience, but also, it’s motivational. As an artist and teacher, I have to find ways to keep moving on, and Proximates works for me. Like Rewana, I need to find ways to bring the joy of “moving on” to more people.

I need help. My way of seeing email correspondence with Rewana is my way of playing Proximates without a press. If Proximates does not play in Africa – which is perhaps the gateway to ways to help save Earth’s human and other life sustainability – then what good is it?

os190328 Structure for collaboration - A life insurance policy for hope 

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking. You would not think, to watch me over the course…

“A structure for collaboration is like a life insurance policy for hope.” – Rosabeth-Moss Kanter

If printmaking were not therapeutic, would I be in such great health? My mental and physical health is good and it’s partly because I have spent about fifty years in the arts and, specifically, printmaking.

You would not think, to watch me over the course of a day, that I am an artist, however, because I don’t fit the stereotype of artist. I do not socialize with other artists. I do not attend openings and visit art museums and galleries.

If one asks me about this – as recently a woman did – I comment that I don’t really like the art world with which she is familiar. It must have sounded odd to me, surrounded as we were, standing in our family’s art gallery, with art!

I assume she would not understand, and I assume she’s not really interested because I have found peoples’ interest in the arts in the United States goes only as far as consumers. Analysis of art and its relation to the world situation is not interesting.

To me art is nothing if not something for analysis. A physicist (or is he a mathematician?) Richard Feynman, believed artists have nothing because their work cannot be measured, its matter measured in terms of Naturally-occurring phenomena and substances.

He’s correct, for the most part. However, the report of art can be measured, thanks to computers and the internet because art has emotional, sensual value and addresses that coffee-bean-sized part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens.

I will illustrate with the example of a web-based acquaintance who has recently come into my sphere of awareness (again, thanks to the Internet). We met because of a mutual appreciation for the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teaching Prize given to Peter Tabichi.[i]

Her name is Rewana Nduchwa (“You can call me May.”) and she the CEO of Chabana Farms, a farmers’ cooperative in Botswana. She noticed my comment on the announcement of Father Tabichi’s award. I had been following this award because the Global Teacher Prize matches my concept of the Gates Prize. In my comment I related this prize to my own invention of The Gates Prize.

This led to May mentioning she’s coming to Seattle in May to be part of an accelerator, Fledge and since then we’ve been exchanging notes online. Her current focus is bees because she wants to extend Chabana’s product line of honey and Fledge is investing in this, supporting her continuing education so as to increase the market for the honey.

By doing this, Chabana creates jobs and may even help solve a problem which farmers contend with: Elephants. Botswana has the greatest elephant population in Africa, and they maraud the farmers’ fields. Imagine what this means: Cereals is one of the products Chabana offers, and cornfields are a favorite of elephants. Elephants fear bees, so if there are beehives around the cornfields, perhaps the elephants will not trample the cornstalks.

My job, as a teacher, is to bring printmaking into education as a learning experience, so I suggest we form a strategic partnership and explore putting printmaking in Chabana’s marketing plan. Using our Mini Halfwood Press model, Chabana can produce prints designed around bees and elephants, deeply-embossed and colorful images printed on elephant-dung paper. The printing is carried on as entertainment, and the prints themselves are offered to tourists who use Botswana’s safari industry as souvenirs.

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[i] The winner of the 2019 US $1 million prize was announced on stage by movie star Hugh Jackman. Peter was chosen from our top 10 finalists who come from all corners of the globe. From teaching in remote towns and villages to inner-city schools, they advocate for inclusivity and for child rights, integrate migrants into the classrooms, and nurture their students’ abilities and confidence using music, technology, robotics and science. Peter has dedicated his life to helping others. He gives 80% of his teaching salary to local community projects, including education, sustainable agriculture and peace-building. He’s changed the lives of his students in many ways, including the introduction of science clubs and the promotion of peace between different ethnic groups and religions. He has also helped to address food insecurity among the wider community in the famine-prone Rift Valley.

mr190327 The value of the moment 

An Emeralda Clue 

Searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life, the Emeralda warrior sees for split second the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web. Two …408 Words
I am always searching for the game play and mechanic of Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life. It’s my job as the Emeralda warrior. I saw, for split second, the possibility that the moment, as can be applied to a new print which has a moment number on it, is negotiable on the web.I’m reminded of the murder mystery when the investigators attempt to determine the time of death of the victim, only in my world it is the time of life, the moment when the proof is pulled from the plate.How can I share this game mechanic research? I know that in order to win the game, I have to invent it, as invention is part of being an artist and a public intellectual.Two challenges lie before me: One, my former students, Carl Chew and Norie Sato, have an embarrassment of riches in artworks, unsold and apparently unwanted. Two, a woman in Africa named Rewanda Ka Nduchwa, wants to put worker bees and people to work, an investment in labor.These challenges are put before me by my author, who, as Amy Tan described it:“So, let me rephrase: I am the author of a novel told by doppelgänger in possession of my thoughts, who inserts her subconscious into my subconscious, which is rather like being unaware that someone has deftly slid her hands into mine. My hands are not the ones tapping the keyboard, although I still believe they are, and these words you are reading are entirely hers, which I still believe are mine.”
My “author” is that muse whom I described lives in the chips of the computers I have used for forty years – since 1979 when I got an Apple 2+, who uncovers words that are already there.
I trust the day will present the game mechanic on a day and in such a way as to solve the problems of Norie, Carl and Mavis (as Rewanda is known sometimes). Because it is true – the people I meet, whether real or virtually, are chief among the gifts of life.

os190308 The old man leans back  

Art student fantasies

The old man sits down in his favorite easy chair and reaches for his pipe and tobacco. He fills it, lights up and leans back. His canvas is in front of him, glistening with freshly-applied paint strokes, bright in the morning light filtering in over the north-facing, sloping windows. Somewhere a crow caws.

It’s good, he’s thinking. Yes. Good. Thoughts of his upcoming show flit through his mind, mentally anticipating this painting and others displayed under bright lights in the gallery. People gather around him, congratulating him and sipping their wine as he answers questions.

He draws on his pipe. It’s such a good life, living on one’s art this way. It’s been worth it. Fifty years of struggle. True, there were hard times, but it’s been worth it.

Or, picture this.

With a clap of her hands the lights flash on and there, before her, is her latest project – a water-treatment facility in Sacramento. A long, curving wall, 360-feet wrapping around a huge reservoir wall.

This may be my best yet, she’s thinking. Or, maybe that airport in Dallas. No, this is better. People can actually get up close and see the details. Yes. This is my best.

Or this:

Every time he sees a Tesla, there is his masterpiece – that tail-light he struggled and fought for.

Or this:

She always buys that brand of cottage cheese because every time she opens the refrigerator door, there’s her art!

These fantasies were inspired by the news yesterday that the Seattle branch of the Art Institute franchise shut its doors in the face of the students who had enrolled there. I’m tempted to say it serves them right, but I cannot because we paid tuition to AIS when our younger daughter enrolled.

She got out, but not without scars that would affect her for the rest of her life. And my wife and I, too. We were sold by their marketing and sales staff. So, too, were parents and adults who wanted a career in art and bought into their program – paying outrageous tuition fees and investing uncounted dollars in supplies and lost wages.

When I read the news, I thought of the time in California when the great exposition was finished and they furloughed all the craftsman – carpenters, masons, etc. – and Sam Goldman hired them to come down to southern California to build the sets for a great film.

Six-hundred fifty students, the news report said, were shut out of AIS. Some were foreign students, and they will have to go home if some alternative school is not located where they can enroll in a hurry and continue their program.

What a waste of talent. Even a minimally-talented art student has value if they have a dream. Unfortunately, their dreams are only that – dreams and fantasies about what they think is an art career for them in fashion design, film-making, digital arts and etcetera.

While it’s true some of them will find jobs more or less like they imagined are waiting out there (like my new customers, the Anderson/Medaus), few will live their dreams.

There is no such thing as a career, said one of my former students. It’s she and her account of the 360-foot wall that I used, above, to imagine what a student is thinking. Her remark was meant to underline the fallacy put forward by marketers of art schools.

Her point was that advanced education, if it involves art, merely gives students a different mindset, a peculiar way of seeing things sometimes.

Another one of my former students said, “But that was always the case . . . that place [AIS] was a dumping ground for alienated tattooed kids who hated their parents and had some juvenile idea of making it big in the arts . . . the initial partial scholarships sets the hook, makes the parents proud and the kid into a believer that they actually had talent . . . you and I know that the BFA kids end up working at an art supply store or a frame shop . . . most never earn enough to pay back the $100K loan.”

What would I do, the reader may ask. What makes me think I have a better vision? True, I am old, like the old painter in my opening fantasy. In my ‘teens I envisioned myself designing record-jackets and movie posters. What changed my mind was the lifestyle of my college professors. They seemed to have a secret, what I came to understand was a mind.

My mentor suggested I teach college art because it was a life of the mind besides a life of making nice designs and interesting objects of art. Besides, there was a war going on, and I’d be drafted if I tried to get a job in the design field.

My mind is still living, and I would suggest to those 650 orphaned students that they should scrape away the scales from their eyes, take off their rose-colored glasses and do what industrial leaders have done to get themselves in the position where they can collect $22,000 tuition fees from a targeted age group with stars in their eyes.

Everyone does it in a consumer society. It’s the leaders in a producing society who are smart enough to survive. If I could sell those orphans on opening a productive company aimed at doing something for a needy country like the USA to help save Earth’s human life sustainability through education, I’d be worthy of the name of professor, or at least a public intellectual.

Yes, I’d convince them, if possible, to startup my International Print Center Incubators, something even Elon Musk or what’s-his-name, the guy that started amazon, wouldn’t have thought possible.

It’s in the balance, Al Gore said, and getting deeper in shit, I think.

vp190304 A contest to win  

Playing Emeralda one day I came upon a PowerPoint dated March 31, 2009 which described the game design for a teaching printmaking online User Experience, or UX.

On the same day I wrapped up a survey of essays I wrote between 2010 and 2019, preparing for the next publication of my anthology, Ritchie Mined, volume 2.

The two are connected, because in my idle time I can enter six digits in the search window and the built-in search engine in Windows will pull up any matching string. This time I played the game using only the last two numbers, 1-31, and today’s first four of ten years ago, i.e., 0903.

It’s part of my ongoing search for a UX for teaching printmaking online. Meanwhile, Jen Graves is on my mind because I listened to her 60-minute talk from Smoke Farm last year, and she mentioned the public intellectual.

She inferred there is the campus intellectual and the public intellectual. I distinctly remembered coming across these two types not long after I resigned, and how it boosted my hopes that there might still be a place for me in the world of the mind.

The big difference between Jen Graves and I is that she is a print-based intellectual who loves and depends upon the physical substance of reading matter, while I am accepting of the intangible mediums of carrying on among humanity. I adopted an imaginary muse named Media for that reason, a playmate as it were, to help me in my loneliness.

Once cut off from the printed newspaper – the Stranger – Jen migrated to another profession, it seems. Once I was cut off from the campus at the UW, it freed me to apply myself to becoming the public intellectual I identified with a long time ago when I first heard the expression.

Fortunately, I do not rely on the tangibles – such as Jen Graves’ column in the newspaper. Such tangibles cannot be depended on in this world, particularly in the USA with its self-destructive bent. I like the tangibles of my work, and I take care of them, but I’m prepared to see them go into the landfill with little remorse.

Nevertheless, I would still like to have met Jen and her kids. Now she is well into a new career – like I was in the late 1980’s. As we both continue to carry the burden of Nuclear Integrative Fantasies, we’re repelled by one another if the truth were known.

Meanwhile, I have my game – or, as in the lyrics of a song that comes back to me, “I have my books and my poetry to protect me.” My poetry is one of dumb hope, a fantasy world where a professor’s musings are a component of a teaching printmaking method designed for online and real learning, a teacher-in-a-box.

If there were a contest for such, I would win, hands-down!