@1@2 ISBN Books: 1980-95, (the books` titles are their International Standard Book Number). Series of self-published ISBN Bookworks (no text, full-page bleed photos, weboffset on newsprint, 128-1024+ pages each, perfect-bound); exhibited, collected, and distributed worldwide. The imagery for the books is acquired and sequenced over time. The next three or four titles are exponentially more complex (include multiple intertwined picture-sequences) and are disseminated electronically over the World-Wide-Web. Every 12 hours, another sequenced image is published on the Internet; corresponding to a gradual turning of a page, allowing time for reflection, interruption, and assimilation. A mailing-list has also been established to enable dialogue between some subscribers. [listserv@netcom.com /subscribe 12hr-isbn-jpeg].
Some Lyrical Descriptions from the Art Metropole Catalogue: (business-size card inserts for the printed books)/ *ISBN 0-9690745-0-6* Synopsis: The lights of the cruise ship dance their reflections across the water. The accompanying book whose title is its ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is the fifth of a number of titles looming on the horizon. It took form sporadically over the past year; the various stages in its production occurring across a wide geographical area in central N.S. There are several anchoring positions for ships in the middle of Halifax Harbour. The shavings are residue from whittling activity. The anchoring-positions are not visible until they are occupied, usually for no more than a few days. It is the suddenness of another new vessel in the harbour which disperses its otherwise substantive quality. All seems lost.
/ *ISBN 0-9690745-1-4* Epigraph: Eyes half-closed. Nothing as strong as solace. Do the themes still connect? A Venus day is longer than a Venus year, the National Geographic Society says. A selection was assembled from more than 2000 photographs taken over an eight month period the year before last. Erect walking became necessary when female pre-hominids lost their estrus cycle. The street runs below the window which is above the cinema. Everything in place. Nothing is ever forgotten, only displaced. The planet spins on its axis once every 243 Earth days and orbits the Sun every 224.7 Earth days. Pyramids have always been. What you once thought still holds. The man who invented the first lighthouse perished in his own primitive model. `It was a totally whimsical point. It`s inarguable of course. The evidence is all around. The facts are there."
/ *ISBN 0-9690745-2-2* Addenda: Just between you and me. There was no other. Who does our past belong to tonight? We understand at last. And while we slept, we vanished. The walls of the world fell in on us. We claimed always to abide by terms. Shattered mirrors and sliding panels. Always. Except when we choose not to. One must keep alert to all possibilities. The old Indian pearl diver clambered onto the dock, grinning and shaking the water from our body. At night we could hear our mind ticking like some cheap alarm clock. Radio broadcasts played on tribal feelings. Our voice trailed off. Truth was delay. A heavy splash followed many ripples. Food, batteries and water-purifying chemicals arrived over the week-end.
Millennium Project: Illustrations for an Essay 1981-89-95, (refracted Crystal Palace, collapsed and hollowed-out and redrawn foreign cartoon imagery; several hundred, various red-inks on tracing-layout-paper collages repeatedly overprinted with 83 small photo-linocuts in white, waterbase lino-ink; possible studies for very large frescoes; Classic PostModern) in-progress. These prints/collages are a very deliberate, compelling and methodical assimilation (palimpsest) of culturally imprinted visions; as this is a major work in transition, I can include here an early slide of some piles of gradually inked red papers. Also a fairly recent shot of a stack of partially printed sheets. There is also a wall-sized, photostatic assemblage (featuring collided media-vehicles) associated with this project, that has been reduced to 10x22", and will likely be used in publicizing future exhibits. The essay is structurally similar, with an architectural referent, to contemporary hypertexts.
Various Photo-Works (1975-95)(b-and-w, c-prints, cibachromes, transparencies); External Structures (firescapes), b/w, big-grainy, with flattened shadows, 16x20 prints, 1991. Red/White,c-prints,@5@6@7 11x14, 1982. White Cars at Night, color transparencies with electronic flash, 1980`s. Nocturnal Reversals, experiments in home chemistry... black-and-white film reversal formulas in conjunction with timed, urban night-exposures, late 1970`s. Many other bodies of photographic works. I`ve been printing my own photographs since I was ten years old. This early fascination with image-making combined with an aptitude for drawing, led to studies of various methods of printmaking (intaglio, hand-lithography, serigraphy, block-printing, letterpress and engraving), as well as a full investigation of photographic processes. Recently, I`ve been documenting the iconography of older, formed-metal signs which can still be found extended from business-facades throughout North America.
@8Electronic Digital Prepress:(pictured is the Hell Chromacom 2000, page assembly and image manipulation workstation) This is but one of several high-end digital prepress systems that I`ve been employed to introduce, manage and operate. The technology continues to evolve; climate-controled drive-rooms and idiosyncratic operating systems are yielding to radically less expensive and difficult desktop systems. Occasionally I do some work as a pre-press consultant. Publishing my photo-based works led to a developed involvement with printing, imaging and computing technologies. I am conversant in most computer-operating systems and a great deal of software (especially graphic/visual/audio oriented).
@9@10@11@12@13ISBN Book page-details: Select pages from the printed books. I have been interested in the occasions when some photographic imagery becomes interchangeable; when the seeming subject sinks below the received matrix of representation. Halftones on newsprint are particularly porous; as is the regular displacement of 72dpi computer-screen imagery. This work has continued online as: The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project: a five+ year sequence of photography imagery.
The Metaconstruct: (1979-86) a few details from over 2000 documentary fragments of 13 interdependent, evanescent installations. In an attempt to have the ongoing-work consume the context of various art-exhibition venues, any given installation consisted of quantities of art-work-elements. Each element was serial and subject to alteration. I have included slides of the Trellii (elaborate, dismantled trellis-structures; sections between points of contact are re-established with finely sanded gesso surfaces), the Sticks (eight-foot, whittled, and painted lengths of pine), the High-Gloss Quarters (thick, shiny, varathane surfaces with layers of stencilled, spray-paint images; shown here are the Anamorphic Clowns), the Landscapes (probably the element that has undergone the greatest metamorphosis: from 4x8' panels of masonite backed, tropical landscape, through to, arched constructions with various insets), the Projections (b/w slides of nurses` uniforms and cinema leader), the Electro-Mechanical Contrivances (in this instance, spinning falls of gradually, unbraiding, red hair, or suspended rattling teacups, or oscillating fans equipped with speakers, playing crackled strains of Amazing Grace), the Ground-Tone and Horizon (a portion of the gallery was painted a particular semi-gloss color, and a snapped chalk-horizon-line established). I also used my own assembled strings of incandescent lights in each installation. There were other components as well (for a full description of all the components, retrieve the metaconstruct1984 file from my ftp-site), but all are now housed in shellacked, cork-lined, plywood boxes. I understood these symbiotic, situationist, constructs to be capable of generating critical text. Sometimes they did. A printed-mailer from this time has the following inscription: Art-objects carry their own space/The corporate-interior is its own image/Tattoos all ablaze. The installations have long stopped, but I will occasionally modify some components; I still like the sporatic ability of some art-objects to delineate the physical and emotive qualities of architectural space.
@20 World Persona: (1989) vdt typeface design. These days the distinction between graphic design, commercial media and avant-garde fine-art, seems minor. I`ve always vacillated between these areas of study; they informed each other. I`ve included this slide as a means of mentioning my design and media background. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of type, graphic art /design processes and multimedia. I`ve also worked as a Compositor (type-markup, Compugraphic and desktop typesetter, assembly), Designer, 4/C Stripper, and Video-Producer. This is a font designed for electronic display only. Entirely digital art is just beginning to blossom and create its own parameters and expectations. Much of my work has used digital technology as a means of distribution, or as tools towards some physical end-product. This font marked the beginning of my own consideration of creative work that `stayed inside the loop." This is research toward an animated, interactive, morphological encounter with self-conceived visages; similar to the manner in which, antique-mirrors can be understood to have reflected and thereby, contained a mediated collection of past presentments... I know this sounds vague!