In the largely pre-digital days of the 1980's, the answer to printing on almost any material was this small controller of atmospheric pressure that made impressions possible even when printing upside down. Sure, that upside down thing got it acclaim as a novelty device but this novelty had a more inventive application. It made printing multiple colors at the same time possible. Mechanical pressure never touched its fluids when printing.
There was only one problem. Fluids are fluid. No matter how thick, their edges move, so precise color application was out the window. By the early 1990's, after giving up on fighting fluid dynamics, reality was given in to and the Idea that this added individuality to each impression was explored.
Problem in that was this dynamic was only slightly perceptible from impression to impression. It may take an entire run of hundreds to see the change between the first and last impressions. So the selling point became the variety of different marbleized color effects the process added to a design's artistic identity as a product.
Now, a quarter century later, deep learning algorithms can identify the differences between the artistic identities of each of these individual products and even restore them to the original sequence they were printed in, from original to final.
The image seen here of the Strataprinter control module is about to become a symbol of the intersection of what is actually possible in an intellectual approach to technology and the visceral power the digital image has over the Internet.
A second generation of exploration is initiated by inviting digitization of everything produced and distributed during the finite application period the Strataprinter applied this multicolor process.
This is a unique opportunity to stack Internet archives that are subject to deep learning algorithms with entities that can be checked against criteria of authentic creativity on a large scale.
A formative state for this is found where my daughter, Heather, is administering the Facebook page at http://fb.me/saugerties that attracts the initial mass distribution of products in the theme that began the story; SignOn to the Spirit; for gathering this genesis group back together to digitize.
