Thursday, December 8, 2022
Flipping my Life for Kids:
Recursivity
John Q. Atanasoff combined four things to make the world’s first electronic
digital computer. One was recursive memory. He called it ________, but I prefer
to call it recursive memory because it reminds me of the famous “snake eating its
tail.”
My autobiography, “Past Life …” is like that – combining Dr. Atanasoff’s
invention – around the year of my birth, 1941 – with the on-screen-only
autobiography I started in 2017, is a way to pay people to help build the
Printmaking Teachers in a Box.
In the illustration above there are representative images of works in the
Ritchie family art collection available for investors in the Printmaking Toys
and Games enterprise. Artiscrip is a fractionalized system for certifying who
owns the works.
Ritchie’s online art collection, a virtual museum of his art, craft, design,
and intellectual property, systematically provides data regarding the works.
Size, medium, back story, etc. are accounted for and may be extended to
physical possession and resale.
Sunday, December 4, 2022
STEM’s last frontier
Print-centered solutions
Print is the last frontier for STEM, the first invention and case
of discovery over thousands of years and human beings finding where they
started and knowing the place for the first time. Yet, in mainstream STEM curriculum
design, print is not mentioned.
778
Words
My life’s work for a museum school
The last frontier for STEM is print, for it is the first thing invented. It
is a case of discovery over hundreds of thousands of years and finding human
beings where they started and know the place for the first time.
In schools where STEM is the avowedly mainstem of curriculum design, print
is never mentioned although it was the invention of replication of recitation
that made all the difference.
Magic and science
Picture two human beings in a cave making what we call art. One is drawing
a horse with graceful sweeps of a charred stick. It is magical!
The other is spraying pigments across their hand flattened against the rock
wall. Also, she covers her hand with paint and presses it.
The first is expressing, “horse,” in a sense, with skill we call artistry. We
can also call this explication – or to explain, expound, elucidate, interpret, or
to make something clear or understandable. These words imply making plain or
intelligible what is not.
The other, making a stencil of their hand. She is inventing print. She (or
he) is showing how to use a template to explicate, “I was here.” That is all.
Their hand is like others’ hands, but not exactly. Certainly, it is shared by
everyone.
This was the invention of printing, and over hundreds of thousands of
years, printing set free the horse, as it were, from the prison that was the cave,
to become sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics – discoveries such as
the photograph that brought the horse out of the cave and on to our screen at
home.
We watched Werner Hertzog’s film, “Cave of forgotten dreams,” and I
associated it with another cave, the Cosquer, which inspired my stories of the
visit to Earth by an alien I named “Media,” who introduced the handprint to
Earth’s women.
Children’s’ books
If you love children, those you have met, then you will write children's
books. Moreover, you will help children write books. This is what Priyanka Raja
has contributed to online learning applications with her company, PopSmartKids.
Within this program she offers products for parents and children designed
for in-home and small group settings. One goal of her company is to reduce screentime,
balancing on-screen with handwriting time. The website includes videos and examples
of kids’ writings, samples from around the world!
Sampling these, one cannot miss the kids’ artworks and illustrations that
go with their stories. It is here where the cave story, above, comes to mind –
the side-by-side relationship of visual and STEM communications.
It was replication – as simple as a handprint – an invention of the
template, a way to repeat an image quickly and nearly exactly. The handprint
might be compared to any solution to a problem.
By “problem” I mean that making a painting of a horse is not simple, and certainly
it took some skill, knowledge, and experience with life in the outdoors of the
times of cave-dwelling people. Not everyone did this, probably because of the magical
power we call talent.
The solution was that the message, “I was here, this is a print of my hand,”
could be made by anyone as simply as stepping on sand – a universal language. In
the science world, much can be read from footprints preserved from thousands of
years ago.
We could not know, today, everything, but this we know: The invention of
printing was the concept, the solution, to making known the art of prehistoric
people. We are not certain why they made paintings, but thanks to print, we can
say the animals – and handprints – were set free.
Priyanka’s world
For sixty years, I have been fascinated by printing – not only as a means
to make art of the kinds I like – but as the original source of all sciences,
technology, engineering, and math. I use STEM as a way I can lead in bringing
humanities to children by adding art, writing, reading, and music to the STEM
space.
For example, Priyanka’s children – two boys about 10 and 12 years old –
visited our family art gallery and workspace and showed me their responses to a
printing press, plates, paper, and printing. In under ten minutes, they proved
to me they knew, intuitively, how to link performance – including music – to the
art, craft, and design of printmaking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)