os200327  Rembrandt’s secret gift  What’s under those floor tiles? 

 What’s under those tiles?

 Fooling around early one morning I came across a HOG and, maybe it was because I’m looking for a way to reach back to my former students, it looked different than when I made it. In this hidden object game, I furnished a picture of the restored studio in the Rembrandt museum.

I’d looked at this picture dozens of times, but today it looked different because of the floor. It’s a tiled floor which was tiled with blue-glazed ceramics. The glaze was worn off in places, revealing red, low-fire clay the tiles were made of.

http://www.printmakingworld.com/emeralda/pp/ppprod/pp_games/RembrandtsHOG/RH_index.html

In the years since I made this image and set hotspots where the hidden objects were, the tiles – not the objects printmakers used that are listed at the bottom of the image - mean more because I wrote a novel years after I made the HOG.

The novel, “Rembrandt’s ghost in the new machine,” I self-published it in 2013 using amazon’s Kindle system. In my novel, those tiles figured in the plotline because Rembrandt put his thoughts on paper, but since his thoughts were risky, he hid them under the tiles.

The floor was full of Rembrandt’s secrets! His dread was that someone would find his notes and he’d be crucified for them. In my story, retrieving the secrets became a driving motive, and my protagonist, Mac, is drafted to help get them out of the room that had been his studio.

Much in my novel has historic bases – how he lost his house and studio in bankruptcy (including his press), the people he associated with, his family and what he was likely doing in 1660 when my time-traveler encountered him. No one knows if Rembrandt wrote anything.

This month I started a rewrite on the advice of an editor I hired a few years ago – John Belmont. In this rewrite a “Rembrandt’s secrets” theme beats the ghost theme. Now, secrets are more interesting.

On this day, the gift of Rembrandt is overtaking his “secrets.” The gift, to me, is what we infer from Rembrandt’s life. He was not on a quest of the kind which colors heroes’ lives. Most likely, he likely just wanted to make art, and he had a gift for it. We might say that by making his paintings and prints he created gifts, but gift-giving was not on his intent.

It was not meant as an offering. It was his business. I don’t think Stephen Spielberg was thinking of making a gift to society when he went to work – he had a passion for storytelling through film and making a living at it. Like Rembrandt, I bet.

Today, we’re at crossroads because the coronavirus pandemic is upon us. No one is sure that life on Earth for humans will look like weeks or years from today. As for me, I’m glad I made the HOG, glad I wrote the novel, glad I met – through my experience writing and promoting it – people like Ernest Horvers and Peter van Honk.

These Dutch men taught me things like Rembrandt taught me. Not as gifts - not that teaching me was their intent. In my mind meeting with them gave me ideas and took on lives of their own in my imagination. I kept thinking up new ideas about printmaking and how printmaking might be useful for teaching people – young and old.

STEM-based education, for example, for kids. By adding Art to the mix (STEAM), maybe printmaking is more important to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math than art teachers realized.

This is not new. Decades ago, when I was a professor at the UW, there were attempts to cross-fertilize art and science. The pressures of the art world always transcended those rare efforts. An artist who took up computer graphics, for example, would likely to end up working for a game company and become a famous artist. A gallery that showing art heavy with technology was unlikely to thrive on this genre.

Today, as I reviewed my old HOG, and glad to see it again, I looked at the floor in the image and imagined what we’d find if my story were true – that those tiles had, the originals in their day, covered Rembrandt’s secrets, his gifts.

This image itself is a gift to me. How can I share it? One way is to back to that image and make a hotspot on each tile. Click on the hotspot, would a secret pop up? A scientist, for example, what would he or she make of that? Imagining this, is Rembrandt’s secret gift.

es200325 Hiding Emeralda: The secret 

   It is especially important in the early days of the corona virus pandemic to own something in the way of an occupation that can be pursued in a lock-down situation, when it’s best to stay inside, out of public venues and confined to one’s home. What to do?

I have a secret. It’s Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life. It’s a suite of games, in plain sight; but no seems to notice it. If anyone notices it, and I speak from past experiences, Emeralda seems to have a repellent quality.

Several times in the past three decades (yes, that’s about how long I’ve played this game) people have asked me to explain. One, Pam Beyette, the artist, asked me, “What’s the payoff?” and since I couldn’t say, we dropped the subject. That was the moment I realized Emeralda is not a game at all, but an activity, more or less.

Another time, Betty Merken’s spouse, David, living in the neighborhood where the best-selling game, Cranium was invented, spent time trying hard to understand my idea. This experience indicated that I’m be pursuing a chimera, not a game and not an activity which can easily be shared - yet.

Pam and Betty are former students from the UW, where I was teaching printmaking. Emeralda became my virtual campus after I left the UW. I built as the ideal, virtual and virtuous university, a communiversity, a paradisiacal region, a community of creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative people. These diverse people all played Emeralda, seeing Emeralda’s abstract structure as ten islands-of-domains-of-expertise of skills, knowledge and positive attitudes.

Emeralda is a gift which I’m given, and I have always wanted to share it. Instead, however, despite my wish, I seem to hide it, as though I had been given a precious stone, an emerald, and I’m afraid to tell I have it. In a world of uncertainty, who can blame me?

Now, as the corona virus pandemic shows how vulnerable our United States is, and staying home, I’m glad I have an abstract structure to play with. It’s lonely, however, like Solitaire. I’d rather it was a multiplayer game – even if it had to be on the Web.

When computers and the Internet showed it’s possible to have Massive, Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, I was excited because Emeralda is suited to this kind of interaction among players worldwide. With Emeralda’s abstract form – a make-believe region, a fantasy world for exercising one’s mind and artistic skills – Emeralda is suitable.

Unfortunately, MMORPG’s are dominated by a different strain of activity – not mind-building and using – but dominance and often destructive behaviors. Winning and losing, zero-sum games seem to be the way.

Emeralda, unlike these, is of the class of game concepts based on cooperation and quests. When I come back to this subject on my next visit to this island called E’Studios (Electronic Studios), I may have an example to share.

mr200316 What did you do during the war, Grandpa? Reflections of a first responder

 He considers himself an outsider, one of a minority of people who respond to stimuli before other people. It’s not that he’s smarter or has better reflexes; on the contrary, he confesses that he tests badly in conventional schemes, is poor at math and sp…

Before I answer, what kind of war is this?

The corona virus is on the attack – not at the command of a human commander or cohorts of a terrorist group. The war on corona virus is like no real war humanity has faced, although it is labeled a pandemic and is compared to past ravaging killers of humanity.

Leaders compare it to war when they speak to the public. The public, however, the masses, are slow to respond. The leaders are the first responders. They sound the alarm, like someone who spots a fire first. They are, for some reason, able to respond first.

I call the ability to respond, “response-ability.” Responsibility is what comes both from the ability to respond and the guts to do it – to respond. Unfortunately, first responders are often frustrated because they are the first to point out an emerging problem. Few believe them. No guts.

Masses of people can respond to a fire, but a first responder calling for everyone to respond to a corona virus - which cannot be seen - is liable to be met with naysayers. First responders are, for whatever reasons, outliers. The medical leader who explains what he or she sees and understands to be an act of war was always a first responder.

An example is in the story of the first responder in China.

History tells of first responders who raised their hands during their school years and how they were put down – either by the other students or the teacher or both. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered,” came to me from a Japanese artist when he contrasted Japanese thinking to the freedom he saw in my teaching in an American university.

Reflecting on this, I can say that the saying is true in the United States, too. In fact, it’s universal – from China to Seattle, for all time; but in a country of plenty, like the US appears to be, emergencies are fewer, constraints are less, and it doesn’t matter if a nail sticks up. People can ignore it. There’s room for error.

That Japanese artist, Akira Kurosaki, met me (and taught me) for only one reason. That was the singular fact that I was experimenting with electronics. I was using video as if one might make something like art with TV. We – the students who were first responders, too – met in a closed-circuit TV studio and, in the afternoon, we worked in a printmaking studio.

Akira Kurosaki - 1980 woodcut print, gift to B. Ritchie

I was hired to teach printmaking. I wasn’t supposed to teach video art. I stuck up. If I had not been doing this, Kurosaki would probably met me. True, I was part of the printmaking division at the UW School of Art, and he was on a teaching mission as a printmaker. As it was, he – being a first responder himself – was interested in video before he met me.

“You’re already doing what I dreamed of doing in my university in Kyoto!” he said. It was 1974.

The war against ignorance

Yes, there is a war against the corona virus, but it is more accurately a battle. The war is against ignorance, that real killer in people. I don’t mean people are basically ignorant, or any more deeply ignorant than I am. In fact, those who hammered me all my life were smarter about conventions than I was – or am.

For example, did I not get fired from teaching, eventually, for aberrant thinking that video could be an art tool? Did I not get fired for proposing reform of the printmaking division so students could extend printmaking and study electronic arts for artmaking? True, I got hammered. I was a first responder. I saw that the students in my classes in 1980 needed equipage to strive and thrive in the 21^st Century. I thought emergency measures were needed. I responded. I acted. First.

I couldn’t articulate and convince the leadership in the 1980’s that we needed to link printmaking to the media because print is the ancestor of photography, film, video, telephony and computer graphics, i.e., multimedia. Printmaking is part of the genetic code of, for example, video games. Today I advocate blending the algorithms of gaming to teaching printmaking. Another first response. I act, too. Every day, on my intent to teach printmaking by MOOC.

In putting this on my blog, I'm MOOC-ing, one might say.

Today, while on-site schools are shutting down, I am watching, from the sidelines, printmaking teachers using computers, cameras, online channels to teach printmaking online. It was this possibility that I witnessed in 1980 when the UW hospital in Seattle – a teaching hospital –used microwave to beam medical procedures to Omak, Alaska.

My video art students were making video art in the same room where, in the hour previous, medical practitioners and electronic engineers were huddling to design ways to get their teaching through the airwaves – via a system dubbed Washington Educational Network (WETNET).

Screenshot: Carl Chew and Scott Milzer in "Theory of Gravity" video
made in video art class, the University of Washington hospital studios, 1974.

In that moment I saw the possibility of teaching woodcut at a distance.

I thought I could teach small groups hundreds of miles away from Seattle if I could translate my woodcut lessons into practice. I proposed it to the continuing education department, and they were all for it; but, I guess the art school leaders saw it undermining full-time equivalent, in-person enrollment.

I was, in this sense, a first responder to a new twist on correspondence schools. The plan, and my experiment in teaching printmaking at a distance, got hammered. I couldn’t ignore it. I was ignorant of strategic manipulation of the powers-that-be. Instead of slowly approaching the objective by finding, “What’s in it for them?” I forged ahead, my head sticking up.

Ignorance means ignore-ance, the tendency to ignore. A fire somewhere in California? Who cares? We’re in Seattle, dummy. It’s raining here! It’s not nearby. A virus in China? Don’t worry. One asks another, “Which is closer, Florida or the moon?” gets the answer: “Duh … can you see Florida?”

I see a need to think of printmaking as something greater than being merely an extension of painting, drawing and design principles – something more than a visual art. I see printmaking as much a social art or a performance art as it is a visual art. It is a time-based art, an art for teamwork, communication, sharing and learning about other people, places and things. It’s an experience that activates more than the eyeball’s receptors and left-side thinking.

STEAM

Science, technology, engineering, art and math are interdependent, where the A stands for the shared necessity of creativity, discovery, experiment and imagination which is quite prominent in art as it is in research in non-art working and professions.

Visual art reigns supreme in this because the eye is a powerful organ. They eye does what certain parts of the human brains like most – eye candy that titillates and pleases the human brain. However, TV and other media arts are more powerful when it comes to education because they operate over time as well as spatial, i.e., visual dimensions.

One of my mentors, Stephen Hazel, said, “The print is in 4-space,” referring to the effect that a pile of prints that scatter out to multiple owners can have the effect o connecting those owners. His teaching had a profound effect on me – like learning how a corona virus piggy-backs on our benign cells and replicates itself – editions itself, in other words and multiplies.

I began this essay at 6:30 a.m. and worked again on it a 9:15 – it’s ten now and time to quit. It was about what I did – and I am doing – in wartime. We have one granddaughter, too. In my imagination, she might have asked me that question.

As it is, I would be happy to share my story with anyone and beg them not to think I’m whistling down the wind, lamenting or complaining. I’m calling all printmaking teachers to consider the paradigm shift that started in the 1970’s and has now an chance to work for the coming generations of STEAMers.

ps200218  On my father’s birthday: Playing the Emeralda game 

 Happy birthday, my father

On my father’s birthday I practice a dark art. If her were alive and I explained what I’m doing, he’d be in the dark. He’d be worried! His son is insane! Explaining a world only he knows, my father would think of me.

“I begin my day at a computer, using the navigation software to determine which of the ten islands in the Great Lake of Emeralda Region I’m on this day. To find this I go to the Gates Year-of-living Copiously calendar on screen and pinpoint the date. It’s Perfect Studios – the Island-of-domain-of-expertise-in-asset-management-and-legacy-transfer.”

My family never fathomed what I do. Our lives were different. Among them there was a unity of purpose and reality and I was an outsider. We make our worlds, or the outside world makes us. We’re either free or in bondage.

I am bonded to my world, what I was told is called the world of the mind or the life of the mind. My dark art is an art of the mind. In his way, my father practiced a dark art, too, bound to the farmer’s life of Nature and the seasons, of animals, machinery and growing things.

“I am a dreamer. Farming offered dreams, too, but the forces of Nature and the machinations of an uncaring society spelled doom to the small farmer. People in this society have no more respect for the farmer’s toil than they do for teachers. Yet, teaching proffered more hope, shielded from the might forces of Nature, it’s weather, diseases and accidents.”

Nature and the seasons, of animals, machinery and growing things brought father joy and frustration to my father and he worked to keep them in balance; and he did a good job of it. There are times when I blame him for my failings, such as my low self-esteem; but like the song, “A boy named Sue,” he had my best interest in mind. I do not doubt he loved me.

He had big hopes for me, and he was frustrated at times because I am not very smart in the same way he was smart. He probably had a grasp of the big picture, but his big picture was not my big picture. It’s hard for one to accept that people have their own big pictures.

People have a jigsaw puzzle in them, and no one’s pieces fits any other’s. I learned this he hard way. A glaring example is my failure at the University of Washington. I brought a complicated puzzle to my colleagues – so complicated that I put everyone to shame. I didn’t know what I was doing, despite I thought my achievements were university-level.

My notion of university level was not their idea of university level. I thought university level meant raise the bar. Their idea was to level the field; and anyone who stood out got hammered.

I read the college code assiduously and took it literally. That was stupid. My father told me so, reminding me I was stupid: “If I lost my wallet in the cornfield, I wouldn’t go look for it in the alfalfa field,” he told me when I resigned to go find, “My Perfect Studios.”

I responded, “I didn’t lose my wallet, it was stolen!”

Thus – on the day he would have turned 106 if he had lived – I practice my dark art in “my Perfect Studio,” an imaginary island on an imaginary lake in a perfect world, where raising the bar every day is what one does with what one was given in the way of a mind and body suited to the purpose of living a life of the mind.

Happy birthday, my father.

ri200120 Emeralda SDG style: One of the many games for the gifts of life  

Other lands for playing 

After a day when I was designing a spinner and game board inspired by my friend Mavis Nduchwa in faraway Botswana, I wonder if there are many kinds of worlds where one can apply the design of Emeralda.

For example, instead of the imaginary place I know as Emeralda, maybe real places like Botswana can be where the game takes place.

My days

I begin these days making sure I have a directory for these ‘Zine essays. I refer to the calendar of my stays on the Islands-of-domains-of-expertise.

This one is RIISMA, the island of research and development on an international scale. It stands for Ritchie’s International Institute for Studies in Multimedia Arts

Surely, it’s here were my engagement with Mavis makes sense, as I am researching and developing my knowledge, skills and attitude toward her, her community, and the African diaspora.

As an American I live in a country guilty of racial prejudice based on ignorance. It’s incumbent on me as a scholar and artist to understand more about Africa in particular.

If I am a world citizen and global thinker-and-doer, I must think how the Emeralda theory I follow as an asset management and legacy transfer system might be have utility value to Mavis.

I may be able to do this by game design. The table in the Mini Art Gallery is covered with game theories in the form of cards, boards, dice, and now a spinner.

Spinner design based on a Botswana basket image

Spinner

We begin with the end in mind – time. Three-hundred sixty days await the Gates Prize winner. For me a paradisiacal region would be populated with poets, artists, musicians and all stripes of creative individuals.

I designed he region around my past experience as an art professor when I learned there were ten characteristics that defined the students who I thought were most successful.

Now I find the context has shifted, that despite I think artists and poets can, as Signora Maria Guaita put it, “Can save the world now,” the calendar may be more than ten islands – it may be eighteen.

The new number is from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG. It’s a prioritized list of goals necessary to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The body that put this list together four years ago listed 17; but they left out one: Printing access.

Printing is not limited to the centuries-old tradition of mechanical reproduction because printing evolved over the millennia to the Internet. However, access to the media is limited; therefore, I added an 18^th sustainable development goal – printmaking access.

Of course, the inspiration for this is my work with printmaking as an art form, but printmaking means more than what some people take it for. It’s not merely an art or craft. Printmaking is a geosocial art form with close ties to performance art.

Vocational school

On January 29^th I made a three-minute video titled, “Diamonds and honey,” which is a description of a book to sell for the purpose of financing a vocational college in Botswana. It’s an example of what MIT Business professor Rosabeth Moss-Kanter suggested as an insurance policy for hope, a structure for collaboration.

The book, in other words, despite it’s near fantastic magnitude and great tasks, is a structure for collaboration. My friend in Botswana, Mavis Nduchwa, has dreamed of better education in her country since she was a teenager.

To me, her story (Herstory) exemplifies all African mothers’ dreams.

os200127 In the shadow of the Gates Foundation: 

Recounting educational compromises 

  I clicked on the Easter egg on the lower left corner of my splash page on my personal website, and it was a mild surprise to see what it’s linked to: The Elephant Print pdf file documenting my artist scrip, and artistscripophily concept.

What a good idea!

Lately I’ve been going to bed with the wish – a nightly prayer one might say – to see the movie in my imagination, Emeralda. It’s the story of a mystery ship and a halfwood press.

Another movie I want to see is Swipe – my autobiographical fantasy about a failed art professor with a happy ending and a globe trotting street kid who inherits a halfwood press business.

South of our Mini Art Gallery is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and I work in the shadows of this mega-philanthropical enterprise. Rumored to be the biggest philanthropical organization in the world, this foundation could finance both movies.

However, it’s not their mission. The closest they come to aligning with my goals is in the area of education. One of their former education executives stopped in the gallery one day years ago, and through him I tried to spark interest in my novel approach to STEM.

Previous to his stint at the Gates he was working for the University of Washington education, but his stay there was short. Likewise, his stay at the Gates! He moved to Colorado to be president of a college.

What is it about Seattle? What is it about Washington State that seems to have a problem with education? I was forced out of teaching at the UW. Carl Chew was forced out of public education. Washington State is no place for teachers who answer to a different master.

While I was reviewing my PDF file, Elephant Print, I wondered, “Where did my enthusiasm go?” It still looks good to me – plausible in many respects. Did I “kill my darlings” as one person put it – a teacher of writing?

They meant not to become too attached to one’s creations, that the way to success in the arts is to keep pushing beyond one’s previous achievements. That’s how I interpret the expression.

In other words, trash the artistscripophily idea – don’t become so attached to it that it drags you down. Move on.

Yet, with the prospect of a visit by a woman named Natalia today who has a common interest in Mavis Nduchwa’s venture in Botswana (called Chabana Farms Kalahari Honey), I can’t help but think the idea has a chance.

I’m ever the optimist – like the expression, “Impatient Optimists,” I saw back when I was learning about the Gates Foundation’s education arm. It was Bill Gates, Sr., who was a co-founder of their foundation, who said:

 "I have an optimistic view of human nature. For the most part, I believe people are good, that we want to help our neighbors. I believe people want to be good citizens. When they see a problem, they want to fix it." —William H. Gates, Sr.

A quick look at this one immediately finds the problem: A critic points out their predilection for charter schools and alignment with people like the Walton’s positions and Betsy de Voss’ – most unfortunate conservatives. With friends like that, a liberal can hardly be optimistic about support for Mavis.

After my review and these words, I conclude it is not the failure of the liberal in a search for a better educational outlook, it is the environment.

There’s a story about a cucumber, bright green, shiny-skinned and hard who finds himself in a pickle jar. All the other former cucumbers are dull, gray-green, wrinkled and soft.

“Wow,” said the new cucumber, “What happened to you guys?”

“Stay here long enough and you’ll find out,” they answered.

ps200119  Upon seeing a big Indian press:  What would E. F. Schumacher say?

 On my Facebook I saw a picture of an etching press – a huge one! I noticed it came from India, in a studio in Chandigarh – perhaps under the direction of Upendar Singh Chahal.

As I looked at it, I couldn’t help but think, “Oh no – this is not right!” Memories of a book came to mind titled, “Small is beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher.

He subtitled it, “Economics as if people mattered.” He meant to comment on the proportional use of technologies, or appropriate technologies. I think his idea was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. I recall the small spinning devices he advocated which flew in the face of British cotton fabric imports which helped India get independence from the empire.

The new press at Lalit Kala Akademi regional Centre Lucknow

The first thing that struck me was the span of the bed – it appears to be a meter wide, and therefore I assume it’s expected to make prints approaching that scale. It follows then there are facilities to make the plates, and these necessarily are to scale.

Then there are the materials and supplies to consider. If metal is used, then perhaps zinc or, less likely, copper. Sheets of plate glass would be cheaper if they are using vitreography. Paper is next – and I believe there are very good paper mills in India. Nevertheless, large sheets of paper are not cheap.

Consider the quantity of ink, solvents, ventilation for safe handling – all this adds up to an expense that seems out of proportion to me. Of course, on the back end of the process are the buyers of the prints (or monotypes) that come out of making art with this big machine.

Who are the buyers? They must be rich! Here’s where E. F. Schumacher comes in. Is this press a technology appropriate to the people? I picture kids – my favorite people – coming to visit the center. They will say “ooh” and “aaahh” at the specter of this process, but they cannot use it. They probably will never use it although a fraction of their numbers may grow up and in two or three decades, they might be able to buy a print.

A smaller fraction yet will grow up to be an artist or a printer using such a press. However, the bad news is that by that time the press will be junk – discarded because it does not fit the economics of the times – say, 2030, a decade from now.

Already, in America, people are unable to support presses of this scale. Only in group workshops can they do so, and in most instances the plates they print on these presses are only small – plate materials being expensive as well as paper, ink, etcetera.

We make a small, portable, beautiful etching press which appeals to grownups and kids alike. It uses paper that’s so small that kids can even make the paper itself!

What we do conforms to E. F. Schumacher’s suggestion – make etching presses that are appropriately scaled to the economics of today and tomorrow.