The open doors you see in the table of contents frame at left will take you into the projects I have been working on for the last several years. If you wish a less random and more informed method of entry please peruse the following paragraphs. The projects are listed in reverse chronological order [for you non-SCADA types - that's most recent first].
I've just started a new interactive project based on digital self-portraits. Get involved with the Mirror and Arms-Length Portrait Project.
In the later summer of 2005 I performed a special Artist Trading Card project.
In early 2005 I put together a show of my fractal art at The Telus World of Science, here in Calgary Alberta. As part of this show a friend and I built a set of web pages as an introduction to fractals.
After I came back from a two-week January business trip to Mexico City I built this page about A January Day in Calgary.
This year our Christmas Greetings feature the Christmas mono-prints I made together with Carol and Danielle [my two youngest daughters].
Sept 18 to Sept 26 1999, I worked evenings at the S T U D I O project that is a part of Calgary's ArtWeek for 1999. It was temporary studio shared by growing community of artists at The Clarence Block, 120 - 8th avenue SW (Stephen Avenue). The studio was set up again during the 2000 Artwalk Festival weeks in September. I again participated and spent most of my time making Artist Trading Cards for a special trading session at The New Gallery.
Early in 1999 (March 29th to April 2nd) I participated in a group show at The New Gallery which is located at 516D 9th Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It is one of the Space for Space pieces called Extravaganza 120, (EX 120) and presented 120 hours of continuous uninterrupted time-based performance art. I participated in it with my Roller Chain Spares: Object Collection II project.
Early in 1999 I was asked to teach haiku-writing to some Junior-High students as a parent volunteer in my daughter Carol's school. To support it I built these Haiku writing web pages.
This year I have combined some of my favourite haiku poems with the collage Christmas cards our family made this year. You can view them at Christmas 1998.
I have recently organized all the haiku that I have written so far for the each day of the Jennicam archive and collected them into The One Year Daily Haiku Project and added a bit of an explanation.
An artwork of mine titled "Civilization" was been included in a net.art [online exhibition] show in Uzbekistan called !R.UZ. Unfortunately it is now over. It is part of a new body of work based on the theme Migration that I have just started.
Last September I hiked for a day in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with a group of co-workers. This project , a kind of photo-essay, resulted.
Dreams can be interesting - if not rather revealing. Perhaps you'd like to try your interpretive abilities on some of mine [Mild Warning: erotic material within].
Very recently I came across a very interesting web cam site at jennicam.org. It is operated by a young woman in Washington D.C. She has placed a camera in her bedroom. Because it is a room where she sleeps, works [at home as a web designer] and entertains there is often something going on. Without subscribing you can see snaps every 20 minutes.
Last year there was a thematic residency at the Banff School of Fine Arts on the topic of narrative where a number of artists produced work based on various life stories. I see Jenni's project in a similar and in fact more interesting light. I have written a Java program that goes out and grabs her images intelligently and frequently enough so that I can record her day in 72 or so files. A second Java program, an applet this time, replays the images like a slide projector. I am trying to keep seven files showing the most recent week as up-to-date as possible. You can view the files and test out the applet on the "JenniCAM - Last Week at Jenni's Place" page.
Lucas Chimello Simões is a young artist from Brazil who is looking for recognition beyond his native country. Somehow he reached me by email and I agreed to do a website for him. And amazingly we have managed to do it all be email. Currently we are working on the documentation of a big installation project he did last fall.
Since my early days in university I've always been interested in computer languages. During my work at Datap Systems Inc. I've been lucky enough to do extensive work in C++ for about five years now. Just before that I had started a programming project to learn C and program various fractals [Mandelbrot and Julia sets etc.]. Recently I have been trying out Java to see if the designers have solved the complexity and memory management issues of C++. I think they largely have! Again I have produced some fractal programs to learn Java. Some of the images I've produced are also available. Here's an example of tree generation, one of growth by random acretion and finally a distorted mandelbrot diagram.
For about 6 years I have been designing, manufacturing and sending out my own Christmas cards using various printing and xerographic techniques. But this year as well as sending it out physically I have put my 1997 Christmas card on the net. There is a personal essay on the Christams season attached.
Several times during the last few years I have had cause to do reading on the subject of PostModernism. I have encapsulated some of what I learned in a series of 8 images with attached poems in haiku-like style.
While at ACAD [art school] I developed and increasing interest in museums and how they represent the various human cultures. I did several museum-based installations for the fictional museum MATEOW [the Museum At The End Of the World - just down the road from the restaurant at the end of the world. Part of MATEOW exists here on the net.
Part of MATEOW investigates how the body has been portrayed in art over the ages and how historians, art historians and others have commented on these portrayals. This exhibition is entitled "Observing the Body" . The commentaries exhibit some unusual text display techniques.
Another part of MATEOW evolved from some research I did on Ancient Egypt. One aspect of Ancient Egyptian art that I quickly noticed was the figure repetition on friezes. The "Hall of Infinite Walls" exhibit demonstrates how some of these friezes can be used as tiles in a web page background. Further exploration of backgrounds followed.
During my art studies I completed a practicum term at the Glenbow museum. My assigned job was the research and preparation for a exhibit on World Aids Day, December 1st. What came out of it was a set of pages designed to focus on the losses suffered directly by the artistic community - losses that have affected us all. I did profile pages on several Canadian artists with writeups by Glenbow staff members. Unfortunately a number of the pages could not be shown because we were unable to obtain copyright releases. These "Day Without Art" pages are presented here.
Long ago I formed a great interest in the artist Max Ernst, who operated mostly in Europe during the early part of the 1900s. He had some ties to the surrealist crowd. The works of his which most attracted me were his collage novels. By taking engravings from adventure novels of the late 1800s and cutting them up and collaging them together he produced several very surreal stories. I have emulated his technique and produced four similar but shorter stories. One of them is reproduced here. I'm sure you can guess one of the reasons that it is called "In the Steps of the Master" .
Around 1992 I attended a course called the History of Ideas for which I ended up doing some research on masks, making a mask and producing a short performance piece. In order to avoid any taint of cultural appropriation I looked for primitive European masks and out of this came the ideas for the performance .
As part of my final year at ACAD I was required to produce a thesis . I put a lot of work into this project and it became an important expression of a lot of my beliefs about art, life and myself. Please look at the footnotes. They represent an important part of the piece - so much so that there are more footnotes than actual text.
