William Blake's Printing Process

I am reminded of hacker, Saar Drimmer’s work [1].

Like Blake, he was subject to a fair bit of censorship and “blind-eyeing” by the dominant institutions of his day when his work demonstrated chip-and-pin credit card authorization was hopelessly broken [2].

But also like Blake, he turned to reinventing the lithographic machinery of the period to create new mediums for expression. Blake with his printing press, Saar with his PCBmodE circuit etching software - creating circuit boards which were published in the haute couture press[3]. And both using in effect the same medium of etched copper plate.

[1] https://boldport.com/shop/dreamer

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5504801

[3] https://boldport.com/blog/2015/11/25/haute-circuits

William Blake was not the greatest poet nor the greatest engraver, but no one has paired those two as he did. He would still be legendary today had he done so well at either.

He always struck me as a transitional form, halfway between the Classic and Romantic poets. Like William S Burroughs was the grumpy uncle of the Beat poets, the Romantic poets took his counsel and his humanity as starting points.

He said that his printing process was dictated to him in a dream by his dead brother Robert. He had many such experiences — coming into his sitting room at night to literally pluck words out of the air, asking Mrs. Blake to place another table setting so he could converse with the prophet Isaiah over dinner. Very likely he was slightly mad.

He printed very few copies of most of his works. He made 56 copies of “Songs of Innocence,” more than any other work. His greatest work — longest, most involved, bringing together all his cosmology in one place — was Jerusalem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem:_The_Emanation_of_th...). He printed 5 copies, and only colored one.

It’s quite the experience to read “America a Prophecy” 200 years after he wrote it. He had high hopes for this new society across the ocean, and was disappointed that it was founded on the original “fallen state” of slavery.

I think this is an example of what the technique shown in the video produces:

https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/blake/images/gm_379057...

(from https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/blake/ )

Blake: Prophet Against Empire is a well known though older book on him... https://archive.org/details/blakeprophetagai0000unse

Hopefully I find this again in my bookmarks when I am 50+, looks like an awesome thing to try one's hand at.

There's something sacred in these old crafts. A blend of unknowns (no theory of anything), but personal involvement, patience, care, enough aesthetics but no quantified perfection..

One of the more interesting people I’ve met in my life, a now deceased professor from my alma matter, LARPed (for a very long time) as the reincarnation of William Blake (had an entire designated church and everything)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aethelred_Eldridge

Perhaps LARPed isn’t even the best word. There is a lot of debate on whether or not he decided to keep up a bit his entire life or genuinely believed he was Blake’s reincarnation. He was incredibly smart, not outwardly schizophrenic (you could say a schizotypal personality, but I think those labels are mostly bullshit - I digress), and didn’t really have any other reasons people might just think “he’s fucking nuts”

I wonder how many other kooky Blake admirers there are in our world…