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.