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?