An alley near 6th street in downtown Austin Texas. Photo taken during SXSW 2010. It is much brighter here than it appeared in the view finder. The sensor in a modern DSLR is better than our eye. It can basically see in the dark. What I didn’t notice when shooting it (handheld, just walking by) is the group of guys. If you look at the full rez version you see one of them, uh, relieving himself against the wall.
Newspapers 2010: the studio floor of painter John Pomara. More photos of John here.
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What the hell is this?
I’ve had a number of blogs and websites over the years, both personal and professional. I ended up despising most of them, but especially the blogs. I do write the several essays a year, do interviews, and, for a while, did cultural commentary for a major newspaper. But these are exceptions and my time for writing is ever more limited. What I mostly do is make images, sounds, videos, short texts, and conduct various creative experiments on the network. Of course I also have an academic career and do research and collaborative projects, and while bits of that may show up here, this site is primarily for my creative work.
Why tumblr?
Because it looks good and because it’s fast. I have little patience for tweaking websites. I’d rather tweak photos & sounds and then post quickly. This first template is fairly flexible and I like the way it presents photos and sound. I also like the way the archive looks. (I take the latest round of tumblr troubles as a good sign: people are using the service.)
What happened to the old stuff?
I did have a number of essays, article reprints, interviews, project overviews, and other posts on an old wordpress blog site. But I stopped updating it. Everything felt like publishing: 1200+ words, edited, presentable. I didn’t like a lot of it, so I deleted it. Some of the posts I will put in an archive section here later.
What will I post here?
Many of my colleagues and friends on twitter, etc are scholars, but my place is a different one. There is a strong complimentary role for creative exploration, misuse, hacking, and experimentation with networks, media, and soon to be connected gadgets of all kinds. In particular, I’m interested in the expressive use and creation of digital and networked objects.
There will be the occasional blog style post but mostly I’ll be posting photographs, recordings, and videos, mostly in-progress scenes & sounds from the studio. I’ve put up a few examples. Look.