Second Sunday Artist Talk - Jack Butler

A virtual monthly event where we showcase the works of a single artist, followed by an engaging open Q&A session.

Jack Butler: CEO, Butler Graphics, Fisher Building, Detroit, retired

Surgical Imagineer, Department of Surgery, Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, retired

Creative team, Henry Ford Innovation Institute, retired

Potter, Earth

Artist Bio: At the age of 10, I knew I wanted to be a potter. Life intervened.

A chance meeting with a real potter (Bonnie Staffel) while on a family camping vacation near Petoskey, Michigan deeply influence the course of his life - the route however, was circuitous. A brief experiment using a record player as a potter's wheel, led to mild electrocution and an extended hiatus towards that goal. 

Jesuits informed my early training at both grade and High School. Science, (how things work), religion (why things work) and art (how things communicate) were the trinity of my education, grounded in the humanities.

College during the tumultuous 70's at an inner-city seminary led to a degree in Philosophy with a minor in Education - and included a year- long retreat as a monk in Nova Scotia with the Spiritual Life Institute of America (SLIA). The focus there was on understanding the East/West differences in philosophy and psychology.

Upon graduation, (1975) I became an antique dealer's apprentice in Cincinnati specializing in rare Chinese carved gemstones and jades. I was able to handle priceless artifacts through the curators of Oriental art at several museums in the American South-East, curators and collectors that remain friends to this day.

I left those aerie heights and spent two post graduate years in Chicago working as a volunteer college counselor at Chicago Illini for the Archdiocese of Chicago's Newman Center. I befriended some math majors in the engineering department and was introduced to mainframe computers (a PDP11 and IBM 360) gave me early insights to the computer revolution that was in its infancy. Three people in Chicago stand out; Eli Weisel, Elizabeth Kubler Ross and Marshall McLuhan (There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew). They all spoke at the college, I was lucky to be there. Art, Religion and Science kept returning as central themes.

In 1979 I returned to Detroit and became a bartender at the Soup Kitchen Saloon, a blues bar that featured the greats, Sippy, BB, Lyman, Myles. My clients were the same, just different pews. I was able to dispense bon mot of wisdom without guilt. I also started doing the ads for the bar at a Speedy Print shop where I saw that the designer was setting type with a rudimentary computer. I offered to apprentice myself to her in trade for time on the computer. A year later I bought the type equipment from the owner and started my own company, Butler Graphics. My goal was to investigate the 'personal computer' experience that was beginning to burgeon.

By 1984 my 'pre-press' business was growing in amazing ways. Type, some still hand-set with lead and wood chases was giving way to million-dollar Penta and CMS mainframes that the agencies and automotive art departments were buying. We saw an opportunity to introduce the now ubiquitous personal PC's to code-based typesetting, with an eye toward the early graphical user interfaces (GEM, Xerox, Ventura Publisher, Magna). When the Macintosh came out we understood the Desktop revolution that was happening in publishing and became one of the first Service Bureaus in the Midwest, offering full page type. Training, hardware sales and support became a main revenue stream for Butler Graphics. 

We were convinced that paper would be dead in a year or so, so we started developing 'Multi-media' services. Our transition from pre-press to video to web and interactivity was about 6 minutes ahead of the industry and I became a speaker at the MacWorld conferences and the Seibold Publishing conferences (1989-1998), 21 conferences in all - speaking on emerging technologies. I would unplug my computer at work, hop on a plane to San Francisco or Boston and go live on stage, showing people what we were doing in our offices in Detroit. Early desktop publishing (PageMaker, Homepage, InDesign) morphed to video compression (Cinepac) and video streaming, web page making and the web itself. Virtual Reality is today's offspring of those early roots.

How people learn has always interested me - how do I learn, specifically. Our projects became more and more about interactive learning, leveraging the new technologies to improve skill acquisition. "Just in time" learning had become the mantra of the Automotiverse, but to me, disposable knowledge is not skill. That's interesting.

By 2003 we were doing a number of projects in the medical field (informational DVD on prostate cancer for patients, 3D media presentations for various speakers). A NASA researcher saw our work and asked us to help build just-in-time, medical procedure guides for non-medical personnel on the International Space Station. Since the Columbia disaster (early 2003) the reduced crew of the ISS didn't have a medical officer. The researchers plan was to use the onboard Ultrasound machine to diagnose about 500 conditions he had decided the ultrasound could detect. The ADUM project was our first software product to fly on orbit. It is still there today. ADUM (Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity) was an experiment to determine if non-medical personnel on orbit could produce diagnostic quality ultrasound images (to be read by earthbound experts) and how much training would it take to train them. Each astronaut has an over-full schedule in their field of expertise, there was precious little time that could be devoted to medical training (a specialty in itself). Whether to "Train to Retain" or Just-In-Time - which would work in emergent situations?

24 years later, we are still asking questions on the ISS and preparing to continue the conversation to the Moon, Mars and its moons. The current question is, can a non-medical person use a differential diagnosis tool (or AI), to make a diagnosis without having to contact earth (when either time or equipment prevent it). We are still using the ultrasound training (we are measuring internal organ size and position during the long flight - everything changes!).

About 10 years ago, as the company had found its footing, I began to explore pottery - finally. I started taking classes at Pewabic, an historic Detroit tile company. My employees were horrified. "You're not at that clay place again?", "You've got a company to run!"

Well, as a result of my training, I knew that becoming good at something takes time - lots of it. 10,000 hours by some calculations. I am putting in my time. I have built my own kiln - I don't make my own clay yet, but I can see that's coming.

I retired (with my partner of 40 years) from our company this last February and transitioned ownership of the company to the remaining (3) employees. I have concurrently opened and maintain a Pottery (Keego Harbor Pottery) at our home in Keego Harbor, Michigan. I still do occasional consulting work with the biomedical folks at NASA for longitudinal studies that are ongoing, concerning the issues posed by long duration space flight.

How we learn, what we learn and why we learn are the big questions for me. I will explore them for the rest of my life - probably, right here on Earth. You never know.

2024 adendum:
Ray died from a stroke in 2020… 4 years ago already. After 42 years together (I was 27 the last time I was single, I’m now 71) I quickly realized I was not good at being single. Through a single encounter at Affirmations (and two years of being best friends) this past New Years Phil moved in. Looks like starting over, but with a whole bunch of experience. Awesome.