Life after Death  

Where printmaking springs anew  

In the afterglow of seeing his design of the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press appear live on Quirky – the social manufacturing website in New York – the author speculates on what he has witnessed and contrasts it with his view that printmaking is alive and well. 

Bingo!

One of the games I play is to start an essay—an exercise in creative journalism cum blogging—with an overview of what I have written before I write it. Call it an abstract or whatever, but a rule I made up is that this overview or abstract must be exactly 255 characters, including spaces and punctuation. The rule came from another rule I learned about in database design—that any searchable field had to be in this number, 255. It sometimes happen that I get that number in the first try. Then I give myself a “Bingo!”

Printmaking alive

In my fifty years in printmaking, I grew up with the short happy life that this art medium experienced in the 60s and 70s when there was a boom in public interest in hand printmaking. The art form had morphed from a purely commercial reproduction industry that started before the 14^th Century, played a decisive role in the industrial revolution in the West and, and then, late in the 19^th Century, printmaking was raised to the level of a fine art thanks to numerous painters and sculptors took up making printing plates into their own hands.

By the mid-20^th Century—the time of my entry into printmaking with 25 years in college art schools—printmaking was taught all over the world as a fine art equally with painting, drawing and sculpture.

However, things changed in rapid order as technology and economics merged with artist’ studios, their gallery owners and publishers. In a corporate effort, institutions and the private sector turned art collecting into a commodity exchange niche and mass production overtook mass customization.

In my opinion, printmaking was cut off from its ties to authentic creative artistry which I feel is at its best when an artist is at once the creator, crafter, designer and producer of their artworks—in prints or in any other medium. Printmaking requires expensive resources to sustain that, in a perfect world, could be offset by the dozens of people who would buy their art.

From the time printmaking became a fine art in the hands of painters, it was often because the paintings were relatively expensive, whereas a mass customized print, produced in small, limited editions, helped put bread on the artists’ and dealers’ tables.

However, when the artist’s hand-made prints, from their hand-made plates, became commodities perceived as equal to machine mass-produced prints (such as posters, magazines, etc.), at that juncture then printmaking had a setback—about a one-hundred fifty year setback.

Most printmakers today continue to use the old methods set up by publishers to make prints more bankable—things like edition numbers and limited edition prints. Also, most printmakers follow the canon of institutionalized printmakers who were their teachers. I am both a student of these printmakers and I was also one of them as a university professor. Such canon includes large-scale prints that compete in scale and color with paintings.

Competition, too, has become commonplace—from competitive print exhibitions to winning space on art gallery walls. Competition in art is never questioned in the art world; I think the acceptance of competition in art is a result of competition for secure jobs teaching in college. These “plum” jobs—which include having the run of great printmaking facilities, salary, benefits, a retirement plan and a bountiful flow of young, creative artists—are hard to get. Winners have to compete with other faculty to keep the job and gain tenure.

This ambiance creeps into the young artist’s awareness and so it seems this is higher education, knowing what the printmaking world is all about. Woe be unto the printmaking professor who suggests that new technologies—video games, for example—are descended from the ancient days of handprints on cave walls and, therefore, video games should be part of the printmaking curriculum.

Printmaking is dead

In the era of protests in the 1970s, when printmaking was at its apogee in its short happy life as a vibrant art form and presaged the flowering of the art and technology movement, I had an epiphany as some critics declared that art was dead.

Conceptual art was the rage and I made two rubber stamps that said, “printmaking is dead.” One stamp was made the correct way, with the letters running backward so it stamped out the phrase correctly. The other rubber stamp was made (after some resistance from the rubber stamp company who made it to my order) so you could read it, but when you stamped with it, it read backwards. I thought it was hilarious, because if you could make a statement like that in multiple and thus get a larger reading audience, then printmaking was definitely very much alive.

Maybe this qualified as an oxymoron made physical, and completion required the actual stamp pad and something to print it on. My point was—and I was still a printmaking professor at the time—to show students that you can say something is dead, but in saying so, you bring it back to life.

Every time I make a plate or a print now—fifty years after my first drypoint prints and screen prints in college—I am living in the fact that printmaking is alive. However, always at my back I hear the mechanical and digital reproduction boom sounding in my conscious.

Music and printmaking

It is a dilemma in a way, and I settle the dilemma for myself by seeing how printmaking is not only related to painting but that printmaking is related to performing arts, too. By identifying myself with performing artists in any little way that comes to mind as I make plates and prints, I reconnect printmaking to what the art was severed from in college by the compartmentalization of printmaking and painting and the walling-off of the visual arts from the performing arts into separate departments.

Printmaking thus lives on in me.

Picturing HWPOz  

When a press goes Zine  

After a year of contemplating the form of an online magazine to come, the author thinks he has hit on a new concept, one which breaks away from the old frame of reference that was the traditional-magazine-gone-digital to persistent recursive online zines. 

Platform press

The Halfwood Press transformed printmaking for me. Looking back at presses I had known—all the way from the 17^th Century replica of Rembrandt’s press I saw in Amsterdam in 1969 to my own design of the Century Halfwood press in 2004—presses (both intaglio and lithograph) fascinated me. Before I got my first press in 1968, I used to dream about owning a press. Evidently, as I love prints, printmaking and the people who make prints, the press came to be a symbol of my passion for printmaking.

A press is loaded with potential, and what the press produces is comparable to a loaded gun—it can be good or bad, depending on the human or humans behind its intent and its effect. Recently we heard about three-dimensional printing run by computers which someone proved could print a gun that works. At the same time this news came out, I was considering a printing press, the parts of which could be printed out and used to make a press that works.

I might still do this!

The printing press is, in a way, like a platform in the sense that it gives footing to those people who would effect change or, the obverse, to stop change. For thousands of years, ever since the first handprints were made on the walls of caves by prehistoric people, a kind of mechanical reproduction took command of human expression over time and space.

The mobile, today, is the descendant of the handprint, and the uses to which mobiles and other computer-type devices are put have decisive effects on human culture. This used to be the job of printing presses—but not so much any longer. As an artist and teacher, I have watched the changes with interest for fifty years.

When I plugged my Halfwood Press into my computer, I had a breakthrough idea. As a teacher, I could teach at a distance over time and space; as an artist, I could use the press to make my art and apply my craft in its making. A set of instructions that, fed into a 3D printer, produces the parts to a printing press is, I think, an example of recursivity.

Wikipedia gives a definition, with pictures, of recursive:

“Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, in which it refers to a method of defining functions in which the function being defined is applied within its own definition. Specifically this defines an infinite number of instances (function values), using a finite expression that for some instances may refer to other instances, but in such a way that no loop or infinite chain of references can occur. The term is also used more generally to describe a process of repeating objects in a self-similar way.”

Halfwood Press Ozine

When I forecast that my hands-on press making days would come to an end within the year 2014, what I wanted to do with the resources remaining for me is create an online magazine in the field of printmaking. I announced my intention to my family, friends and associates. I called it, Printmaking World Online. I came close to paying for the trademark—I was that close!

One person said she didn’t like the title. That gave me pause. I signed up to attend the Southern Graphics Council conference coming up in March, 2014, with the Halfwood Press as the name of our booth. As the date approached (and my debt approached $3,000 for the project), the opportunity to announce my brainchild—a printmaking magazine online—began to beckon me for attention.

When it was necessary to design the paper handouts and business card that reflect the name of our booth, Halfwood Press, I took the picture which I had used in 2004 when Tom Kughler made the first Mini Halfwood Press and it occurred to me that the online magazine should be, simply, Halfwood Press.

Is this recursive?

Is this not an instance of recursivity, I wondered. The picture showed the first Mini, the press that is the prototype of all the small Halfwoods that followed. It lacked something, so for an hour I doctored the photo and added the clock—updating the Legacy Mini Halfwood to the way it is today. Then I added the PressGhost—cutting and pasting in the red and black USB connector. Finally I pasted in the image of the Smartphone with its image of Rembrandt on the screen. The original already had a CD/ROM in it, plus hand tools for traditional plate making. The hand that reaches in from the upper left is pulling a proof from a drypoint of our granddaughter at age 5.

The photo—meant for the business card for my online magazine (re-named “Ozine”) has a great narrative value. I think about making it available online, with hotspots so someone can explore the elements of the photo and learn what they mean to me.

My time is running out here—I am going to work with one of my associates at the Pike Place Market in Seattle. He is spending several days a week to explore the potential of the Busker Etcher—a musician who not only knows how to play for the public but also how to print for the public at the market.

Good subject for Halfwood Press Ozine, init?

Halfwood Press Ozine  

A different slant on this year’s topic  

For six month he has been ruminating on to option to quit working on Halfwood Presses and take up publishing an online printmaking magazine for the printmaking world. Now it occurs to him he can stay on the pathway he made on the Halfwood Line—a platform.  

Walk the line

Johnny Cash’ famous song goes:

“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

I keep my eyes wide open all the time

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds

Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

The Halfwood line of presses has kept me focused for ten years, giving me a thing to pop my eyes wide open in the morning and work on all day. I keep the incoming feedback from people who bought them, and that gives me ties to bind my artistic vision with social and economic ties.

In this sense, I could say I “own” the Halfwood press; it’s mine. I wanted to be a printmaking teacher, and because the Halfwood Press is mine—and my invention of the PressGhost and serious games—I walk the line.

Halfwood Ozine

Almost a year ago—on the tenth anniversary of the Halfwood Press concept that came together as the Century Halfwood Press—I knew change was coming. We are deep into the age of digital reproduction and the conventional printmaking world has drifted far from its roots in performance and technology arts. A new generation, led by the Millennials, is re-shaping the printmaking world, finding in printmaking elements suitable to the 21^st Century.

Printing has been the Nexus of performance and technology which has given us the artifacts of human history. For example, an ancient people’s civilization is discovered and we see it in printed and broadcast images. A prehistoric person in a cave smears his or her hand with paint and prints it on the wall, or spatters pigment over it to leave a stencil—an act, a performance. It might have been a performance we can guess at and, again, we see the artifact in printed and broadcast pictures.

Thanks to the art world, printmaking has been isolated from performance, and only artifact of the printmaking performance—the fine art print—is celebrated and traded in the art market. With the generation of young artists with whom I spent the first part of my career as a college teacher, I learned how to restore the tie that binds printmaking with performance arts and, subsequently, to photography, film, video and games.

Everything ventured, everything gained

I walked off campus in 1985 never to return to the cloistered academic world where printmaking was hewn of its branches to the performing arts and technological inventions of the digital age. The root of printmaking is to be seen in those hand prints on the walls of caves, alongside the laborious, gifted work of painters and sculptors who gave us the paintings of their game. I like to think it was an impulse that made someone figure out that they could make a perfectly good image of their hand by painting and printing it, or stenciling.

That might have been one of the creative leaps of imagination and realization of something new, and that was the beginning of mechanical reproduction. This was the coming together of art and technology, and the Halfwood Press venture taught me how to make an instrument out of an etching press to go along with restoring the ties of printmaking arts with performance arts.

It helps that the presses are beautiful and functional “machines” in ways similar to musical instruments—harps, pianos, oboes, guitars, etc. A renowned guitar musician was interviewed on the radio and I heard him say, “You define your instrument, and then it defines you.”

We—my wife and I and quite a number of our friends—invested everything in the Halfwood Press venture. Now it would appear that the winds are shifting and our craft is going to become an online magazine, the Halfwood Press Ozine.

What is the Wow Metaphor? 

How Emeralda and the World of Warcraft compare 

Two-thousand four was the year the World of Warcraft, a Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game (MMRPG), was released and also the year the first Halfwood Presses were made and sold to become the bases and platforms for all new experiences in printmaking.

Preface 

Note that this essay is created in the realm of Perfect Studios, the domain-of-expertise in artists’ asset management and legacy transfer. On this island domain, we consider all the ways that the works and offerings of artists, crafts people and designers may be maintained, cultivated, and incorporated in the EarthSafe 2022 mission.

Perfect Studios is one of the ten domains-of-expertise in the imaginary place called Emeralda, and this imaginary place is devoted to games for the gifts of life. On each of the ten islands, different strategies are practiced, but they are all related to printmaking, a performance, time-based art that developed concurrently with painting and sculpting.

The World of Warcraft evolved in the United States, starting with a company that designed ports for other companies’ games. Then, three recent graduates from UCLA eventually brought about the earliest versions. This was in the early 1990s, as international events impinged on the United States political and economic policies, laying groundwork for an undeclared civil war in this country. Generations of failures in American education policies resulted in dominant ignorance and American vulgarity which had worldwide consequences.

EarthSafe 2022

My casual encounter with the Union of Concerned Scientists—which I had never heard of until one day, on Guemes Island, I happened to find a brochure that this organization published entitled, “Worlds’ Scientists Call for Help from all Humanity,” in which 1,500 renowned scientists signed an agreement that five problems would end Earth’s Human Life Sustainability within ten to thirty years. It was 1992, and counting.

Thirty years would put us at 2022. Our two daughters—Billie Jane and Nellie Adelle, would be 53 and 50, respectively. The scientists were describing five factors in human societies all over the world which needed to be addressed immediately if the Earth was to be able to sustain our daughters’ lives. As an artist, what could I do to help? And, if 1,500 scientists of high reputations could agree on five points, despite their nationality, religious beliefs and other commitments, would there be 1,500 artists of comparable accomplishment in the field of art who also would agree to sign up to help the scientists?

I felt like a person who had been living in a cave, and in that moment I had stopped my clumsy scrawls and my handprints on the walls of the cave, and looked outside. I saw nothing—no one who called themselves an artist who would sign such a call for help as did those scientists. To agree on five points would require, first, reading them. Who did I know that would read the UCS’ brochure, and immediately agree to help?

Despite that I was close to several renowned artists, I felt reluctant because my past experience gave me to think they would dismiss the brochure. I found the brochure in the community center on Guemes Island; I had been invited to talk about new technologies I adapted to serve traditional printmaking education—things like the first PC-based hypermedia tool, ToolBook—which was Paul Allen’s answer to the Apple Macintosh Hyperstack.

In the coming months I made up my mind to do something—but what? I didn’t know; but I made my resolution to put my future in the context of EarthSafe 2022—do things to help the worlds’ scientists as well as my talents would allow. Because if, by the year 2022, I had done nothing, then my daughters—in their middle age by then—would know the shame.

WoW and me

When I visit the websites for topics on the World of Warcraft, it seems to me that the three graduate students who started it (at the same time that I discovered the Union of Concerned Scientists’ brochure) belonged to a college-educated generation who were oblivious to the five issues of which the worlds’ scientists referred. Well-trained (I will not say educated) in computer science, they found easy money was to be made selling violence in the game industry.

I think violence of the kind you see in WoW is the result of ignorance and vulgarity of the kind we think of as having existed in the Medieval ages when people were barely surviving the elements and who were easily influenced by those who had superior intellect and creativity and could conjure spiritual and ineffable answers to basic questions of sustainability.

For example, questions like, “Why did the neighboring tribe attack?’ The leaders’ answer: “Because they worshipped an inferior God.” What should be done? “Fight back, to the death if necessary, for it is written that we are superior because we are the true human beings and they are animals.”

This thinking had nothing to do with the availability of resources and what is needed for sustainability. If the neighboring tribe wore their hair a certain way, or their skins were of a different tone, then these appearances were somehow lumped into the need to scorn them, destroy them and take their homes and kill their leaders.

WoW employees at company headquarters in California create and sell monsters and evil forces easily enough after generations of failed education in the public schools and colleges of the USA. For the past century classroom teachers have had to fight for their students’ attention and respect ever since TV took over American thinking as regards education.

Teachers have also had to fight for public support and, often times, they have had to fight their own school administrators for their pay. Today, getting young students’ attention is even harder because of video games. And there are more dire forecasts. TV shows of the 50s may have presented a skewed view of American values, but they are nothing compared to the impact of WoW and other games such as Grand Theft Auto.

Many United States children are being set up, in my opinion, to rally to almost any call to help reduce Earth’s human life sustainability for the coming generations. In my opinion, those who call themselves artists and who create those monsters and virtual experiences are minions for the industry, not artists at all of the kind we need to help the scientists save Earth’s human life sustainability.

Busker Etcher  

Fun and prints at Seattle's Pike Place Market  

I am making up a game to play along with another printmaker named Ethan Lind. We call the game, or project, "Busker Etcher," a name that derives from Ethan's drawings of bluegrass musicians and other artists who sometimes play for the public on the streets of Seattle and at the Pike Place Market. We started out with a rule that I would loan him a Mini Etching Press if he would get a spot in the Pike Place Market and use the press to print, live, at his place in the crafts and art walkway.

It was not long before Ethan sold a print, and on that day, March 7, 2014, I took the snapshot, above, of Ethan holding a freshly-printed intaglio print of a woman with a guitar, and the famous Pike Place Center sign and clock in the background.

Ethan can also sell the press, of course. If anyone reading this is interested in knowing more, or who also wants to "play this game" and be part of it, let me know! - B

SEA of Ozines 

Scarcity, exclusivity and alignment in printmaking world 

Prompted in his daily reading of Mequoda dailies, an online magazine consulting company’s blog, the author who wants to start an online magazine for the printmaking world considers his position by slightly altering Mequoda’s advice to fit this ozine idea. 

Scarcity 

I read an online advice blog from Mequoda—a Boston consulting company which works on transitioning magazines to online magazines. Their pitch is constantly toward the niche magazines, and this suits me because printmaking, my native art form, is definitely a niche enterprise. It always was, and always will be. This makes scarcity an issue because this has kept the printmaking market alive and gave hope to many printmakers who want to practice their freedom to make prints however they want, in their own way, and yet who hope to earn back their investment in materials and supplies.

Some printmakers have attempted, and succeeded, in earning back enough to make a living. A few got rich, but very few, and none of them did so without opting for conventional market practices—including the illusion, if not the fact, of scarcity. The edition number, for example, you see on most modern prints, is a sign that the artist and his or her publisher are banking on the scarcity factor. The illusion that there is a limited number of prints makes some buyers happy, even if they aren’t crazy about the image.

The ease by which digital prints can be made and distributed has more or less blown away the scarcity illusion. Practically every artist has a web site or a blog and they are likely to publish the images that they make as digital images—virtually free for the taking. Scarcity is an illusion, but two other factors remain which printmakers can use.

Exclusivity

Exclusivity goes hand in hand with scarcity. For Mequoda, they equate exclusivity to the “most important pieces of real estate” in a paper-based magazine, which consist of the inside cover, inside back cover and back cover. The article says if you can sell these to one, two, or three advertisers on an exclusive basis, it is highly profitable.

Mequoda is writing about subscription magazines, just as the paper-base magazines rely partly on subscriptions for their profits (along with advertising). Free online magazines may advertise too, of course, without the readers being required to pay for their subscriptions. This is a blog, actually, and bloggers don’t assume they are making money on their work. If you, who are reading this on my blog, are not paying, you know what this means.

However, in my contemplating an online magazine for the printmaking world, exclusivity means more because at this time there is no online magazine—subscription or otherwise—for the printmaking world. There are social networks, but to date there are no online magazines as counterparts to paper-based magazines. In fact, there are only two paper-based productions that I know of in the English language: Printmaking Today and the Journal of the Print World.

Alignment

This is where there is a shift away from the mega-markets of magazine publishing and the very tiny niche of printmaking. Alignment, says Mequoda’s article, “Technology allows every advertiser to access positions next to highly relevant content. But it’s highest for the niche subscription website publishers we advise, because their tight focus on specific topics gives them an advantage over general interest publishers.”

This means, one, if you start up an online magazine such as I envision, PrintmakingWorld Ozine, you can have a tight focus next to the elements that make printmaking a unique art form. It is aligned with performance art and technology. Performance art and technology are the core values of printmaking.

What this means to advertising, to start with, is that our printmaking press line is the veggies and potatoes of the magazine. Our press line treats printing presses as though they are musical instruments, comparable to the beautiful grand piano and the Casio keyboard. They are part of the public artist’s showcase when he or she gets a spot in a public market, art fair, or street location.

Alignment with editorial content is important, too. In my opinion, art education as it is known in the education world today is lacking in foundations that would, if it weren’t for college art departments, make human creativity more relevant to solving today’s problems and the problems that face tomorrow’s adults. My idea of content for a printmaking online magazine is content that restores the connection between human creativity, technology, and mechanical skills in a time-based, performance art.

Ghost Games 

Portal to a print pal game 

Having the basics of the DIY WeeWoodie Rembrandt press now in place, the designer turns his attention to the next phase for the PrintmakingWorld Ozine and its several small printmaking presses—defining and development of ‘Proximates: The print pals game.”

What is Proximates?

This is a social networking game made for people who do hand printmaking. Nominally it is an extension of the fine art print field, and it originated as part of my campaign to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking. The physical platform for Proximates is the small printing presses I began designing ten years ago—the Halfwood Press as it is known.

These presses took several shapes and attracted hundreds of people. A couple years ago I got the idea to go back in time to the original designs of etching presses and I made mini-version of the press Rembrandt probably used to make his famous (and, also, infamous) prints. I named it the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press.

Around five years ago I introduced the concept for an interactive game to go along with my campaign to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking. Printmaking is the ancestor of all media technologies and, for that matter, all technologies that depend on communication of exactly repeatable images by mechanical means.

In the age of digital communication, all of history that was limited to mechanical reproduction in the past—picture books, diagrams, magazines, etc.—took flight to the Internet. It was quite soon that people invented games to play on computers. The combination of printmaking with digital devices gave us so-called “digital prints” and expanded artists’ means of expression and communication.

However, despite the interest in and purchases of our Halfwood Presses, my goal—restoration of the cultural value of printmaking—eludes me because people are not aware of the creative possibilities of the act of printmaking. The creative act of making printing plates, preparing to print them, and pulling the prints is hindered by its connection to institutionalized printmaking. The way in which printmaking is defined as a “fine art” gives printmaking a mistaken identity.

When people think of visual arts, common sense tells them this means painting and the graphic arts; printmaking is lumped together with other visual arts regardless of the unique ways in which printmaking evolved. From playfully or ritually-made handprints on the walls of caves in prehistory evolved the invention of means by which intentionally made, exactly repeated images can record their own making and doing and—given the right materials—the act of creation may transcend hundreds and thousands of years.

If you look at an image of the handprints on today’s computer screen or on your mobile device, consider that you are seeing 30,000 years of printmaking but that it is also a moment in time, an almost immediate result of an act of human creativity. Whether those handprints are “serious” images (like their adjacent paintings of animals and human figures) or the result of idle play or entertainment we will never know.

I choose to think they are acts of creativity and mechanical experimentations with pigments and spray methods and so I associate printmaking with performance and creativity. Leaping through time and space, today my “game” I call Proximates is intended to underscore the actions of human creativity with transcending time and space—not only as a kind of painting and drawing that can be replicated for commercial profits.

It is particularly for young people who, from the ages of 2 to 18 years, are learning what they will need to know to understand their own potential in helping Earth’s human life sustainability. I refer to children all over the world who can connect to the Internet by computer, smart phone or tablet device if they learn how to print with a press.

Therefore I invented Proximates; lately my wife suggested I call it “Print Pals” after the old “Pen Pal” arrangements of our youth. My goal—to restore the cultural value of hand printmaking—will be assisted by developing Proximates as part of all the presses I design.

How it works

People schooled in institutionalized and commercial fine art prints have been taught to follow a system of edition numbers which was invented early in the 20^th Century as a marketing tool. Publishers and art dealers meant to capitalize on the rarity aspect of one-of-a-kind paintings and drawings. Rarity is valued among wealthy people because a rare object, such as a huge diamond or old master painting is tantamount to economic and political power. It is easy to shift this factor to equate to cultural value because such rare and beautiful things as works of art have inherent cultural value, too, if they convey something of the person, the people, the materials and times involved in their making.

Also, the printing plates change because of the wear and tear of printing which, in the sales pitch of the publisher and art dealer, means there are variations in the print equal to deterioration. Therefore, print number one is “better” than print number 100. The numerals, 1/100 written on the print gives it a higher economic value. These edition numbers are as good as gold, therefore. Art is thus reduced to the level of plain metal; the act of human creativity that might have inspired the original print is lost as the print might be equal to the value of a gold Krugerrand coin. In this sense, power becomes the basis of the art, and the cultural value of the “fine art print” becomes—as Walter Benjamin described it—political.

Therefore, I reject the system of edition numbers and, instead, replace it with a time-and-space number I call the “moment number.” The moment number is in two parts: The moment in time that the print was pulled (within a minute in the 24-hour clock system) and, the second part, the space on the Earth where it was printed, expressed in degrees latitude and longitude.

The moment number is the basis for Proximates: The print pals game.