For thirty-four years Andy
Green—a Research Associate with the world’s leading photographic
company—worked on the improvement of photographic chemicals, papers,
processes, and equipment for both colour and monochrome photography.
His particular area of expertise was in the area of medical radiography.
He
began programming in the 1970’s and has been using microprocessors since
the introduction of the Intel 8080 that was used to build hardware,
write operating systems, and create software for processing machine
control. In the early days of the Internet he began developing a product
for transmitting pictures via E-mail. That led to several years of
working with an international team developing a series of software products
to support a growing range of digital cameras, etc. His function became
“user interface” and his software is still used today.
In
his retirement he has taken to using that expertise in the area of making
prints using much of the same technology that he helped to develop.
At
the same time, interests that he kept under wraps for years are coming
to the fore. Among other things, he has a classical education. He
has studied everyone from Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle to Isaac
Newton. He is the son of an incredible woman who wrote an exquisitely
nuanced account of an alchemist. He is an accomplished photographer
and a musician who plays the guitar. Lo and behold, what he has discovered
is that all these things are coming to bear on his printmaking—for
the art of printing is an alchemical process, after all—and his dealings
with the artists AGKC works with. The upshot is that AGKC is not just
a business. None of this is an accident. Something is happening, though
we don’t know what it is, and magic is most definitely afoot.
Karen-Claire
Voss was until recently Assistant Professor
of American Culture & Literature at Fatih University in Istanbul.
She is former Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at San Jose State
University where she taught for five years. After doing doctoral research
in France for two years, she moved to Istanbul in 1994. She is a sometime
speaker at academic conferences in Europe and author of numerous articles
on topics ranging from imagination, mysticism and methodology in esotericism
to philosophy of education. Translator of Basarab Nicolescu's Manifesto of Trandisciplinarity (State University of New York
Press, 2001) and his Poetical Theorems (forthcoming), this year she’s
working on a book about spiritual alchemy, another about ‘feminine’
gnosis, and a third, a joint work with a Turkish artist and writer about
the surprising commonalities of two women from utterly disparate cultures.
After a decade spent in Turkey, Karen-Claire has utterly fallen under
its spell and now, passionately interested in traditional Turkish culture,
especially music and dance, she is working on a collection of short
stories inspired by her experience there that she plans to bring out
in a volume called Istanbul? Yes, Istanbul.
Why has she
become involved in a printing business in Scotland? one may ask. Well,
Karen-Claire is the kind of woman who is extremely curious about everything—love,
sex, death, chocolate—everything! And during her first visit to Gourock,
when she discovered just what Andy Green was up to and the kind of artists
he was working with—‘Now this,’ she thought to herself, ‘is something
new’—and so she threw herself into learning all about it. After
a series of truly serendipitous encounters with the people in his circle,
she understood that there was much she was meant to contribute. Their
partnership is alchemical, to say the least, just like printing. It
all fits together.
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us on 0796 327 8233
