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1.
person
dd:
Your  Web-CV
introduces you as "Multimedia Developer, Visual Poet,
Essayist, Mathematician, Senior Technical Writer". This
seems to be precisely the conflation of abilities that
digital aesthetics demands from its artists. How did you
start and how did this wide variety finally
emerge?
JA: I did a degree in
English and Math in the late seventies/early eighties. Then
I did a literary radio show called Fine Lines and,
later, ?Frame? for six years that concentrated on audio
writing, sound poetry, and so on. It was all analog, but I
got a feel for all the radio production gear, for working
artistically with tech. Still, I hadn't touched a computer
and recall the fear and trembling associated with my first
few sessions on a computer, which was available at the radio
station. Where's the right button???? Help!!!! Where is the
great one who knows the magic button???? Ah, I feel like an
idiot running to her again! Where is she? I think we learned
a bit of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 pre-Windows or
something. Somehow there was more fear involved in starting
to use computers than the analog sound equipment--there was
always the prospect of losing your work, for instance. I
recall coming to feel eventually that it wasn't much
different from working in the recording studio in the sense
that you need to just get in there, hit all the buttons,
learn to read the docs, see what happens, and eventually you
own it. And I also approached it as 'just another form of
language,' which seemed to help, since I was more familiar
with language than machines.
The radio show had begun
with interviews of Canadian print-writers and productions
for radio of traditional print-work poetry and fiction. And
some sound poetry. But as I got into radio more, I
discovered audio writing by artists such as Gregory
Whitehead, Susan
Stone, Helen
Thorington, and
blackhumour,
who have writerly backgrounds but go far beyond either
writing or radio drama in their recorded works. That and my
reading of McLuhan
convinced me that there was more interesting work to be done
and listened to by treating radio and recorded sound as
artistic media, rather than transferring work from print to
radio and recorded sound. I've tried to carry that idea in
the other media I've worked in. And I started to correspond
with audio writers and avant garde writers in North America
and Europe, many of whom have, like myself, moved primarily
to the net. Helen Thorington, for instance, does
turbulence.org now whereas in the eighties she produced New
American Radio for National Public Radio in the
USA.
The last thing I picked up
in six years of producing radio/recorded sound was a sense
and practice of composition for recorded and live sound.
Sort of like hearing voices and sounds in the head. But also
composing with the razor blade and tape, and opening up to
the value of the random and experimentation. I'm trying to
develop a similar type of sense of composition concerning
interactive multimedia for the Web. Though of course most of
it happens in the act of working with the material itself,
rather than sitting down to do something that I have
completely composed in my head.
After the radio show ended
around 1989, I went back to University to study Mathematics
and Computer Science, which I hadn't done during my degree
studies. Education was relatively affordable back then in
Canada. I did three years of that. I had a UNIX account and
access to the Internet, and the Web was starting to happen
at that time. But I was more into doing a literary magazine
called And Yet and reading lots of poetry and writing during
that time, which I did in PageMaker and started using
CorelDraw 2.01 and bitmap programs for visual poetry.
After I quit University, I
went into biz as a freelance programmer and technical writer
and was in a couple of bands as a percussionist. I learned
Visual Basic and Delphi, which are fun visual programming
environments, and relate strongly to Director, which I use
now. C++ is very flexible, of course, but I was never
interested in working that far within system stuff or, worse
yet, database stuff, was always more drawn to the interface
and working at the application level rather than making
industrial widgets.
Then in 95 I started and
hosted a weekly live poetry reading venue (lively media!) in
Victoria BC Canada, my hometown. That's still running,
though I am not part of it at this point. And the Web was
really starting to kick in, so I learned HTML, Javascript,
and some Java, and met Ted
Warnell, Talan
Memmott, Claire
Dinsmore, David
Knoebel, Jennifer
Ley, Reiner
Strasser, Philippe
Castellin,
Miekal
And and some other
digital writers on the net. My site started out as a listing
of the upcoming events at the poetry reading series, and I
started to get in touch with writers around the world, which
I had longed to be able to do for some time.
The first Web project I
participated in was Florian Cramer's wonderful Seven
By Nine Squares project
in 95, though I didn't have a clue what Neoism was at that
time. Four years later, I met Maris Kundzins in Seattle, who
was in on the beginnings of Neoism. We had great fun a
couple of evenings as he recounted the history of neoism to
me and I showed him Florian's neoist project and much else
on the Web. That was around 99 or so, during the time I
lived in Seattle from 97-2000. I worked as a technical
writer and solutions architect there for networkcommerce.com
during the web boom. I'd end up going to bed at 3 a.m. after
working on the vispo.com site, and dragged myself into work
in the mornings. I knew few people in Seattle, so that was
my opportunity to hunker down into my own work and do less
community work.
I've since moved back to
Victoria and am doing the web.art full time now.
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