Biography

introduction

I've been using this personal website as my digital home (here's an old postcard of my real home town) since around 1998; adding to it, leaving work in progress lying around, and rearranging/redesigning like the rooms in a house. For some reason, I'm sometimes getting over 7000 hits a week, so if you read this (and can be bothered) contact me saying what you like or dislike. Feedback might just (and often does) encourage changes to the site.

I don't know how to describe what I do, except to say that I'm a creative generalist (and I'd say an art of any kind is the medium for a creator), mixing special interests and long-term lines of inquiry with artworks, research and paid work, a process that spawns new directions and ideas in a recursive process.

This site is arranged in three main sections (all containing more than first appears) plus this biog, each with it's own coloured links throughout the site (see top of page). I like the tradition of easter eggs, so some links might not be obvious. Other sections exist only as web peninsulars with maybe a single link from some page or other, and not much of a way back (you know where the back button is :-)

what I do

I produce art, music or sound, and also text - mostly short stories - roughly in that order at present, but it varies. I'm a self-taught hacker in certain areas of mathematics and programming, and an information addict with a huge interest span and an almost pathological aversion to specialisation. I've stopped worrying about appearing naïve in any one sphere - focussing on only one discipline is admirable but I simply can't do it; I'd miss what's gained through multi-threaded approaches. Other artists working with technology have highlighted this issue of disciplinary homelessness for 30 years or more; the venerable Leonardo magazine is testament to their tenacity. From 1998-2002 I was a visiting researcher at CCRS with many other artists. I've delivered seminars on emerging interfaces and their implications for artists/audiences and accessibility, and for many years had a special interest in art-technology and disability, being one of the people turning DisabilityArtsOnline into an independent site under Arts Council England funding and reporting on emerging technology and disability, delivering seminars to various special interest groups. I research techology and culture, and teach under- and post-grad New Media part-time at DeMontfort University, Leicester.

what I'm interested in right now and recently

music and literature

• Honing and recording a catalogue of songs and testing them out at local floorspots
• Editing an existing and growing body of short stories and flash fiction for live readings
• Thinking about that difficult third album for the band I sing and write with
• Some recent experiments with smoke'n'mirrors('n'lasers) with artist Aidan Shingler

research (papers, essays)

• Pondering whether the nature of human creativity is defined by the self-organising patterns of the natural world, in a deeper and possibly more literal manner than simple analogy or artistic inspiration
• Compiling a list of crucial concepts for the 21st century - in other words, things that would be good to share as common knowledge, partly to counter popular misconceptions and to encourage more thinking
• Thinking about the best way to teach basic networked technology skills to successive generations who have grown up with the Wii and Facebook, but who don't understand either the context or the practice of programming
• Writing up notes on the cultural history of magic squares
• Chipping away at a little app that aims to locate inconsistencies in belief systems and examine how we extract meaning from the natural world

research (projects)

• Applying to the ESRC to fund a project that aims to find a way to accurately track individual movement within sizeable human groups in a defined space at a finer resolution than offered by current GPS. This is an issue in Social Science, and aims to contribute in some small way to the Research Councils UK grand challenge What distinguishes the identities of individuals and groups, and what makes them cohere?
• Being part of a group based at the IoCT aiming to involve disabled creatives (of any discipline) in the development of technologies from the start
• Chipping away at two ways to reduce the complexity of magic square sets and how they relate, and writing software to help in the process.
• Creating an online artwork that acts as an oracle of random things (more later) and includes research into the so-called Mantegna tarocci - I'm planning to use the Ruby micro-framework Camping for this
• Writing up a few other feasibility explorations for interactive art-technology projects

research (previous papers, essays)

• In affective computing in art.
• A paper (in collaboration) published in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media on conditions for emergence in collaborative art (adapted from a rough essay)
• A paper on 'cultural anxiety' around the Web 2.0 label (yes, coders, tehcnically, I know it's nonsense) published in Media Culture and Society.

research (previous projects)

• research into visual representations of tagging
• Creativity Conversations projects.
• I occasionally contribute to events such as the Knowledge Sharing Synergies Workshop for the Attainable Utopias Open-Design think-tank at Goldsmiths.

Tired? Yes, not that I'm complaining, one person just doesn't have enough resources to do all the fascinating things that can be done, which is why I love collaboration.

Professional work is under the Eco Consulting Partnership (download resume).
Artists' statement in Word or PDF.
I am a part-time research fellow at De Montfort's IoCT, but stopped using that wiki as no-one else does (so it's not a wiki).