For thirty-four years Andy Green—a Research Associate with the world’s leading photographic company—worked on the improvement of photographic chemicals, 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 Kempock Digital works with.  The upshot is that Kempock Digital 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 is presently 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 Inverclyde, 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.