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 like the rooms in a house. For some reason, I occasionally get 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 me to update the site.

I'm probably 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 freelance work, a process that recursively spawns new directions and ideas.

This site is arranged in three main sections (containing more than first appears) plus this biog, each with it's own coloured links throughout the site. 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

These are the people who inhabit the intersections of the Venn diagrams. They believe in ANDs rather than ORs. They're a member of more than one subset, more than one tribe. The reason these people are important is, just like merchants who go between real tribes, they carry ideas from one intellectual tribe to another. I call these people "glue people", because they not only join themselves to a tribe, they join tribes together.

- Larry Wall, Perl, the first postmodern computer language

I produce art, music and text (mostly short stories) roughly in that order at present, but it varies. I'm a self-taught dabbler in certain areas of mathematics and a doodling hacker/programmer, as well as 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 one discipline is admirable but I can't do it; I'd miss the multi-threaded connections. 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

research (papers, essays)

• Academic profile on Mendeley and Academia.edu
• 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 the technical background or the practice of programming
• Writing up notes on the cultural history of magic squares
• Exploring how 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 (paper accepted for Consciouness Reframed 2011)
• 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)

• Preparing for a project that aims to track individual movement accurately 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?
• (Now finished) part of an IOCT-based group 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 Tarocchi - I'm planning to use the Ruby micro-framework Camping for this
• Experiments with smoke, mirrors and lasers with artist Aidan Shingler
• Creating the artwork for Aidan Shingler's StarDisc sculpture in Derbyshire
• Writing up a few other feasibility explorations for interactive art-technology projects

research (previous papers, essays)

• 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.
• 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)

research (previous projects)

• research into visual representations of tagging
• Creativity Conversations projects.
• I occasionally contribute to various events related to my interests (e.g. 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).