Artifacts

Musings from the Print Shop

This week I gave myself two special joys: getting back on press in the letterpress shop with some new linocuts and printing the first story from The Tower of Dreams on risograph. There’s a special magic in seeing something take physical shape – the feeling of making my ideas “real” with carving tools, print blocks, paper, and ink is a big reason why I do what I do. 

I started carving linocuts in 2022 as a way of physicalizing my writing, which quickly spread to me learning letterpress and risograph. The potential of these analog print processes to infuse their products with tactile power and the obvious presence of the human-made inspired me to act on a long-held ambition of mine, fueling the creation of my first RPG, Retrograde.

Retrograde launched almost exactly a year ago – since then, I’ve accumulated a whole host of artifacts from my print experiments. Cardboard boxes full of lino blocks hide under my desk. Shelves overflow with monoprints and print proofs. Milk crates full of finished books and reams and reams of paper lurk in the corners of my apartment, and a plastic tub endlessly accumulates paper scraps, its contents rising somewhat forlornly, awaiting warmer times when I will hand-pulp them and recycle them into new sheets, laying to dry in the sun on towels and old bedsheets.

These artifacts are a living history of my creative practices, constantly changing, deteriorating, getting lost, resurfacing, disappearing again, old linoleum and misprints crowding around my carving tools, a kind of distributed palimpsest nestled somewhat haphazardly between the fresh paper and uncarved blocks awaiting their time to play in my creations. I’ve always run according to organized chaos, and there is something both inspiring and affirming about encountering your own previous work: when I am stuck, I can look for a print to jog my memory and remind myself I can, in fact, create.

These print artifacts are a nexus, as the physical always is. One artifact is a piece of the past surviving into the present. Several in sequence show an evolution, how one experiment lead to another, new knowledge allowing for iteration and improvement. Turning the abstract into the physical is a transmutation, infusing text and visuals with new meaning as they are combined and modified to fit together, given new texture by the peculiarities of paper and ink.

There is something specific about time there. The physical is marked in time inconstantly. It will be marred and changed, and such changes become a part of it. A crisp, newly printed paperback is not the same as one with a cracked spine and yellowed pages – the latter has been on a journey, and between the two books a reader is bound to come away with different experiences. 

This is the kind of thing I love to create, the kind of experience I’m hoping to use the power of the physical to facilitate. Slowly but surely, I’m working on a game that explores artifactuality in a multitude of forms, perhaps in a more ordered and meaningful way than the haphazard state of my studio. In my notebooks, the basic form of The Prismatic Oracle is starting to take shape, different rooms prompting players to mine artifacts from a world of magical creation or bring in textual and physical ephemera from their own time and place, slowly but surely building a tome of history or prophecy or both that they will bind by hand. 

With luck, those tomes will be bound to create new stories entirely, dreams of other times and other worlds that can reach us with the physical. It is that transmutation – the unreal affecting the real, a story making us feel something – that I find the most magical. 

– Zosimos