ap150901 What did you learn in school today? Notions from the Northwest print center

ap150901 What did you learn in school today?  

Notions from the Northwest Print Center   

As he begins his daily maintenance work on his patron database, a song runs through his head about schools, taking him on a time-trip back fifty years to when Pete Seeger sang, “What did you learn in school today?” The author’s school will correct errors. 

Above: Two examples of older collectible trading cards by the author, ca. 2009. 

Database for collectible trading cards

Tom Paxton’s 1964 song ran in my head as I started work today: “What did you learn in school today?” It was the year I graduated from college, married Lynda and the two of us headed to California so I could get my MA and teach college art and thus avoid getting drafted into our dirty little war in Vietnam. Paxton’s song didn’t do much good, in my humble opinion. When you read the lyrics, you can only smile—I think the word is sardonically.

As we left San Jose, two years later, me with an MA and a UW teaching job, I told the department head I planned to be a great teacher—not be a great artist. He was set back, I think. Now, when I look back over my 25 years in college—as a student and as a professor—I can see that teaching, real teaching, was, in the minds of most of the professors and administrators there, a secondary goal.

That’s why, when I plan the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator, I think about the teaching components and how to balance real teaching with practical things. For example, I am working “artistically” on the idea that collectible trading cards (CTC) are an art form. If one should find CTC being taught in an art class in any art class today, you will see the teacher’s focus is on the visual and tactile qualities only—as the industrial versions, i.e., Magic: The Gathering, have established it.

In my class—the school of my imagination—we study what is not obvious. We begin with symbols on MTG cards and then switch to our own symbolism. Mine, for example, are ten colored triangles in a specific position on the cards. Another six—for a total of 16 colors—stand for other things.

Additionally, there are databases linked to the cards via the Web—hotspots in the digital versions and QR codes on the paper versions. Therefore, what you learn in my school is database development and management.

A good school always gives its members a laboratory in which to practice what they are trying to learn. In zoology, for example, the pickled fetal pig or frog has served for decades to acquaint students with anatomy. In our school, the Ritchie Family Collection is given—a preserved collection dating back over fifty years and including every kind of data that can be used to make a collectible trading card interesting and a means to invent games.

pp150816  Kickstart the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator  

Kids in Riga and Amsterdam - Why not in Seattle?  

The two photographs below are “Kids-with-presses” a photo album of young people in Latvia and The Netherlands. They are kids having printing experiences.

If kids in Riga and Amsterdam can have a printing experience, why can’t kids in Seattle? These two images combined Seattle inventions. Seattle’s team invented the mini press, left, for Riga’s kids, inspired partly by the one on the right at Het Rembrandtsuis.

I seek people in Northwest industries who support building the Northwest Print Center and Cultural Arts Technology Incubator.  Seattle and Amsterdam have much in common, but Seattle has no center to showcase printmaking leadership as does Amsterdam. Printmaking is not only a visual art. It is an art that can address the mind as well as the eye, giving the thinking person intellectual opportunities plus eye candy.

A child traces around his splayed fingers with crayon and experiences the manual template. Handprints evolved through 300 centuries of mechanical innovations—from handprints on cave walls to the Internet. It is seemingly endless tale of inventors’ quests to replicating human thought and expression.

Northwest industries lead the way

Seattle is a region of leading industries for information technology. Northwest companies are known worldwide for computer operating systems (Microsoft), online marketing and sales (Amazon), search engines (Google), digital graphics (Adobe) and concurrent engineering and manufacture (The Boeing Company).

All these technologies descended from a single ancestor—printing. Printing combines ink and a template, and a template is like an algorithm. Algorithms stand as abstract art stands compared to realistic art. It took about 300 centuries to come from handprints on cave walls to what we have now for global communication.

As all technologies descended from a single ancestor, printmaking is the ancestor of all our Northwest technologies. We, in the Northwest, cannot let the arts and crafts of printmaking be locked in 19^th Century, visual art frames.

Everywhere, printmaking arts and crafts are taught and practiced as though printmaking is merely a branch of visual art, suitable for commercial purposes and art stardom. Printmaking is much more than a visual art. As the root stem of new technologies that gives the Northwest region economic stability, it should be wholly experienced and taught holistically.

This needs a center which reflects Northwest technologies—not only visual arts.

Who can say how a mechanical template—a tracing around the hand—figures in writing code? Is there a connection between mechanical principles a young person accumulates in early life which, later, becomes the means of abstraction suitable for problem-solving? Replication allows sharing of ideas via technology—whether by shared digital snapshots, video, music, or the whole spectrum of multimedia.

The Northwest Print Center will clarify and strengthen the deeper meanings of printmaking. Not only an art form akin to painting, drawing, sculpture and the crafts, printmaking is a powerful union of mechanical and intellectual development in the human psyche.

We may start with children’s participation in the printing experience. The experience can extend to plate making, and reach toward new technologies—the digital systems that make 3D-printing and laser engraving, social networks and community building possible. The Cultural Arts Technology Incubator will be a starting point for businesses and education services to develop from the richness of what our region offers in its deep well of experience.

150812 What's in a name?  

The name of the Seattle Printmakers Center to Northwest Print Center & Cultural Arts and Technology Incubator because this name is a better fit, more inclusive, and more attractive to visitors coming to Seattle.

Imagine, for example, you are a tourist in Seattle and reading a brochure. You may be a print collector, or perhaps you have a background in the printing industry - now retired. The word "printmaker" is, to most people, a strange word, ambiguous and even a little off-putting.

If you don't know for sure what "printmaker" means, maybe it's not for you. Would you go, and risk disappointment, or even embarrassment? Time is short when you are a tourist.

On the other hand, the Northwest Print Center, while it sounds a little like an office copy place, the fact this appears in the context of a visitor's guide or tour magazine rules out that idea. In the art world, prints are known as fine art prints - art aficionados do not have to be told what's likely to be in store at a print center.

There are print centers in other parts of the world, too, often times in the same place as local crafts for which a city is well-known. In Japan, artisans can be seen printing famous block prints by Hiroshige, Hokusai and other famed artists.

The Incubator part

The main purpose of the center is actually not fine art prints, even though this is the ancestral art form for the center's primary theme, its "brand." Rather it is education, training and innovation which creates jobs and productivity for its membership.

If you are in the incubator, you might be developing a video game with the purpose of teaching the chemistry of printing - both the chemistry as it was known in Rembrandt's time and in modern industrial printing. You may be part of a team which is producing our country's only digital art magazine devoted to fine art prints. In another part of the complex, your role might be that of an editor preparing a YouTube series that teaches the fine points of hand carving wood or linoleum blocks or little-known historical factoids.

In the original business plan for the Northwest Print Center, formerly known as the Seattle Printmakers Center, nineteen businesses were identified which, taken together in a cooperative and interactive way, would make for an important Seattle asset, to be self-supporting, profitable and a benefit to many people inside and out.

pp150617  Why I want Arts and Culture Designation for Uptown  And why I’m offering Uptown a game

His long range goal is a printmaking center, an art, culture and technology incubator for future generations, so as he volunteered to be on a committee to get Arts and Culture District designation for his neighborhood his mission was to design a fun game.

Artist’s statement: Why I want Uptown to be an Arts and Culture District

The City of Seattle's mission in creating Arts and Culture Districts is to ensure that the organizations and individuals that produce verve—referred to as the geese that lay the golden eggs—remain healthy and vibrant for future generations.

In other words, Uptown’s residents, businesses, organizations and civic entities can get help from the City to produce verve that will last a generation. Think of forming an Arts and Culture District as Uptown’s first step in a 20-year plan.

As a longtime resident of Seattle, living in the Queen Anne neighborhood, and being part of the arts and education community for fifty years, I can look back at the history of relationships among artists and organizations, institutions, businesses, and the City and I could tell you what I have seen. If only we had the time. Some artists say they work best under a deadline. I’m one who does. I set my deadlines far into the future—ten, twenty and, if I live so long, thirty years.

Time, however, is running out and time is like real estate—there is no more of it. When you blend time and real estate, the importance of Arts District designation becomes important to artists’ economic survival. Strange as it may seem, artists can, I have seen, thrive when they participate in the City’s management.

As an artist, property owner, and a mini-business I want to grow, I think Arts District designation for my neighborhood—Uptown—is a good thing. That’s why I am working on the game, “Loosey Goosey Does Uptown.”

Why play games?

There is a lot of talk about games. My guides in regard to games include Confucius (“Better to play games than do nothing at all’), Jane MacGonigal, author (Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World) and James Paul Gee (What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy)

Seattle is big on games—from the Mariners and Seahawks to Big Fish and Halo—and technology companies like amazon.com have game economy designers on staff. Uptown is probably the home neighborhood to members of the game industries that add to Seattle’s economy. In my plan for the Northwest Print Center there is a game company in the plan; and it’s because of this that I offer a game to assist in the application creation.

My challenge to Badminton Royale #6

With Loosey Goosey Does Uptown, (LGDU) I pretend that I am competing with the only other offering to help achieve Arts and Culture designation: The Badminton Royale #6. I say LGDU has purpose beyond a one day badminton game that gets someone a bottle of whiskey.

Also, I’m serious about games with purpose; and my purpose is to get Art and Culture designation to benefit Uptown for the long haul of twenty years—a board game of enduring value and which may lead to the biannual Golden Egg Award. LGDU is a team-building game to deepen neighborhood awareness of one another and unify our work for economic benefits.

Badminton Royale has a head start on my game plan. According to the Seattle Times, it started in 2008 as a tailgate party for On the Boards and grew into “a highly organized, competitive, day-long set of matches with smack-talking and fancy racquet moves to match the outfits.” The trophy was a bottle of Jack Daniels.

LGDU will be a 90-minute long session that blends history, culture, architecture and notable figures in a match of knowledge about Uptown and its art and culture assets. Two eight-person teams compete with each other in bouts of trivia and little known facts about what has happened in Uptown, what is happening, and what is planned to happen. The trophy will be the Golden Egg Award.

The object of the game is make Uptown’s self-image deeper, higher and wider through its residents, businesses, organizations and civic entities’ awareness of facts and stories.

vi150611 Identity Crisis:  Confessions of a longtime sufferer  

It is shameless self-indulgence to say so, he confesses, to think about oneself and one’s identity but he sets forth to describe his problem when he’s planning to make another public appeal for investors to buy his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center.

Productivity

I’m sitting at my computer looking at a digital form I am supposed to fill out so that an event which I will attend next week will have correct information and improve chances to start up the Seattle Printmakers Center.

The first blank spot on the form has me stumped—like a kid filling out a college application who can’t think why he wants to go or what to major in, like a lot of young people at points in their lives and uncertainty looms large.

What is the official name of my company? the form asks.

What name did I use when I signed up? I paid my $160 for a table at the SURF (Start-Up-Real-Fast) Expo. That’s an annual event put on by the SURF Incubator in downtown Seattle. I signed up as Bill Ritchie. I’m not a company, but I am half-owner of Emerald Works—an R&D company developing software and equipment for the printmaking and media arts.

Who am I?

White male, 73 years old, Married, US Citizen. All I can add to this of any gravity is “former professor, UW.” In the real world some kind of title, like CEO or Vice President, etc. is helpful. What qualifies a person, in other words, to command attention from anyone?

I have led a privileged and fortunate life, the highlight of which was landing a plum job teaching at the University of Washington. The odds of my getting this, at age 25, were zero; but politics intervened. A paranoid, middle-aged art professor was looking for a protégé, a new hire he could shape and prepare to maintain his campaign in that tiny sector of the academic art world called printmaking.

I was chosen because I was enough to get high marks in a cow-town college art department, good enough to pass the GRE (graduate school exam), finish an MA (but probably not good enough to get an MFA), and good enough to get the recommendations of my faculty—some of whom were former students and colleagues of my sponsor! My hiring was fixed, but I didn’t know it.

I thought that I was hired because I was good enough to beat out the other contenders, willing to take a low salary and follow the orders of my betters. I went to work with a vengeance, despite the warnings from my new fellow teachers—most of them recently hired, like me—that my real mission was to topple the guy who hired me because they thought he was a tyrant. Actually, he was my hero until I got to know him better.

Long story short

So long ago this was that I doubt if anyone remembers. It was the highlight of my life; it reminds me of the short story about a guy on his deathbed who recalls his only moment of glory—making touchdown against all odds.

I’m not anywhere near dying, but my past keeps coming back, dogging my attempt to invent myself. Not re-invent. I never did invent myself. I responded to what I thought was expected of me: Be an artist, for example. Art was the only thing I was good at doing.

When people said I was good at art I said, “Shoot, I have good hand-eye coordination—that’s all.” Now, in my mature years, add, “A good imagination but also a kind of mental illness by social standards. Great minds have written that creativity, imagination, inventiveness, and discovery are virtues of an adventure-seeker, a developer, a statesman, rocket scientist and, yes, an artist.

Society needs these misfits, the great minds say. The trouble is, sometimes the formula doesn’t work. The worst that humanity has experienced is when madmen have their moments of success and bring about grievous results for humanity. How much better off would we be if, in the young Hitler’s, his interest in art and architecture had been encouraged?

Is life a crap game?

Back to my on-screen form: if I put “Emeralda Works” in the space, as it is truly my official company name, it is the bona fide truth. We have a business license and we file a Form C with our income tax.

If I put Seattle Printmakers Center, it’s not official. I have yet to file for the status of a corporation—the official papers are still waiting and $180 filing fee; and the business plan is incomplete. Is it ever going to be? I wonder.

My plan is that the Seattle Printmakers Center will be like the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, or a local example, Teatro ZinZanni—a consortium of a number of companies with certain shared costs. In what I call my business plan, there are nineteen parts to the consortium.

One of them, the Halfwood Press line, has a demonstrated market value, a tangible, profitable product. The work of this member of the consortium I call the Factory School of Printmaking Arts is to produce small designer etching presses for the lifestyle sector. I estimate its gross annual potential at $8M in 3-5 years. A share of the profits would go to sustain the Center’s overall activities.

Chances for success?

My identity is that of a farm kid with zero chance of becoming a full professor of art. Yet, dumb luck and handy at art (plus enough mechanical ability to attain reasonable technological skills) got me to the point where I can start a high culture, high-tech incubator with a low-tech etching press. I can ask for capital to Jump-start Our Small Businesses, as in JOBS Act, title II, of the Obama administration.

Today, it’s all about productivity, after all. Therefore, in this light, my identity crisis is not a crisis at all. My identity is tied to the product, which in turn resulted from my passion for printmaking and everything, and everybody, associated with it. Including that madman who hired me in 1966 and saved me from the draft and Vietnam; also my best friends and former students, and the hundreds of people who bought my art and press designs.

Crisis over

I did not mention my passion for writing which, if you have read this far, you noticed. I learned in college about the lasting power of writing, especially fiction. Alongside design and production of presses, I think writing is the art of influence—the “butter” in the economist’s formula of guns and butter. Or, in my story, etching presses and software.

If I am the genius that my psyche major college roommate Bob Biersner declared that I am, then my genius is expressed in the melding of etching press and new technology that are intertwined (as in Martin Buber’s definition of entertainment).

So, fill in the blank with Emeralda Works, for it is the official name of my entity and sponsor of the Seattle Printmakers Center, of which I hope to be the founder and artistic director—like Norman Langill is to the Teatro ZinZanni.

sp150511 Necromancing the press -

Divining the future of the Seattle Printmakers Center 

With the prospect of yet another round of proposals and conjectures about the viability of his plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, the author is drawn to the sustainability in posing the question to his muse: “Can I pay for the SPC with press money?”

You have to be prescient and persistent

I heard so many stories in the past about people with an idea who met with rejection again and again and yet they continued to try to succeed in convincing other people with money and power to make a dream come true, and finally, they did meet with a person—or people—who believed in the idea and the dream became reality.

These stories are always associated with projects that we regard as milestones in the arts, sciences, technology, and entertainment. In other words, the successful ones. It seems as though the back story is always one of struggle and persistence. I wonder, is there some combination of timing, erudition, design or personality traits that made these?

In one instance, when Negroponte wanted to start a center for researching new technologies at MIT, he used a set of interlocked rings to illustrate what he meant—each ring representing a technology which, when linked to the other two, yielded a sum of technologies greater than the sum of what each one meant. Telephone, computers, and video, for example, might have been what he showed the people whose support he needed.

In the case of Steven Spielberg, he simply took over one of the offices on a movie lot, put his name on the door and pretended that he belonged until, eventually, he got the attention of the people who believed in him. The list of artists who needed other people to team up with him or her to get the job done and found that team is a long one, always it was not without a long time of struggle and repeated proposals.

So it will be with me as I form the Seattle Printmakers Center. I would like for this to happen sooner, because. at my age, I realize that I may lose some key element in my senses—my sense of humor, my creativity, my vision, hearing, etc.—before I get in front of the “right” people or person.

My press, your press

Among those who already have shown their belief in my plan and my design of etching presses—Tom Kughler, Ric Miller, Ron Myhre, Warren Ralls, Ernest Horvers, Ethan Lind and Isaac Miller to name a few—there is no doubt about their sincerity. However, all the spare cash they have would not be enough to launch the Seattle Printmakers Center.

In the second tier are the people who already have bought a press—and this is about 150 people worldwide, a few of whom bought two or more presses in the past ten years. Yet, even with one-hundred seventy presses sold, this is not enough money. These sales represent only about $180,000 in gross income.

The calculations at hand suggest that over 800,000 more people in the US alone would buy the presses if the presses were made and marketed proportionately—a market of about $8M. The uphill climb for me is like the aspiring movie-maker who needs a half-million dollars to get a movie made, and overcome the doubts of the producers that the movie would be profitable.

Necromancy

Necromancy is the dark art of communing with the dead to find out what the future holds. In my novel, “Ghosts in the New Machine,” I used the idea of time travel to go back and ask what it would have been like if my mini halfwood press had made its debut in Rembrandt’s time instead of the year 2004. I only scratched the surface, as I found that in Rembrandt’s situation, it might have made a difference because the old master, down on his luck, could have worked his way out of debt by making playing cards on my mini halfwood press. He might have survived the stress of having been forced to leave his home. His family might have had better living conditions. His wife might not have died, and his son, too, might have lived if their conditions improved because of the mini halfwood press.

In this way I am necromancing the press—pretending to solve my problems of financing the Seattle Printmaking Center by addressing myself to the press as if this inanimate object embodied the ghosts of dead artists. Like a genie in the bottle—or the powers in that plate in the novel that has the power to take one over time—the press suggests that I, too, could make cards on these mini presses, designed to earn me the fortune that it would take to build the Seattle Printmaking Center.

os150517 My Golden Eggs: Value your customers because they are gold 

 Beginning to survey and update his database to connect with the business plan of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., the author reflects on the use of “Golden Eggs” as an expression to describe his patrons and is amazed to discover its use in “Angry Birds.”

Neighborhood of Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc.

When the Seattle Arts and Culture office suggested that art activists in our Uptown Queen Anne collect names of arts and culture groups and artists’ names and the square-footage that they devote to their art and culture, several things happened. I contacted the one who is in charge of tracking artists’ space in Seattle last year when I was surveying likely sites for the Seattle Printmakers Center, and our meeting had a domino effect.

At first, I thought the SPC should not be centralized, but that it should be dispersed in areas of Seattle. Or, it might be centralized, but its outreach programs would go all over—from the Pike Place Market (where Ethan Lind was helping me start up the Buskeresque Etcher) to my neighborhood Mini Art Gallery and beyond.

When I discovered that an apartment building was going up next door to the Mini Art Gallery with 105-units and about the same square-footage for living as I planned at the SPC (69,000 sq. ft. compared to my 60,000 sq. ft. SPC “Media House” plan), it changed my thinking. The ground level would be a place where the Seattle Printmakers Center “visible” activities could be situated.

The Arts and Culture contact encouraged me to meet the architect and anyone else associated with it. The administrative architect pointed me to the developer, owner of the property. It is where Silver Platters used to have its store, next to the parking lot. The entire half-block would become one building, with an plaza inside. It happens that, next door, another apartment building with street-level shops would be built, too, by a different developer.

This is the background to the Golden Eggs in the title. I became aware that I needed to meet more neighborhood people who might give their support and advice as I move forward to create the SPC. Through the architect, I got the dates of the Design Commission meetings where the building plan would be evaluated and, next, the Uptown Alliance Design Framework planners.

At the first Uptown Alliance meeting I attended (after many years’ absence) we were shown an APP called “SeattleInProgress” that laid construction sites over Google Maps. Each construction site was marked with the familiar yellow pointer. I thought of the language in the Seattle Arts and Culture survey, “Golden Eggs” as it referred to the gooses, i.e., the artists who are the ones who lay the golden eggs, arts and cultural benefits in the community. I pictured little golden eggs dotting the Uptown neighborhood, each one indicating an arts and culture resource.

Business plan

At the stage I am in of writing the business plan for the Seattle Printmakers Center, Spc., I now come the section that comes really hard for me: the financials. As I plunged into the task of writing profit and loss statements based on past performance, financial projections under the new plan, and financial analyses of all types, I came again to realize that, if I am one of the geese that lay the golden eggs in Uptown, then it is my patrons who are the “golden eggs.” Because, without my art patrons and people who bought my original presses, then I would be just another goose.