art & Philosophy
My interest in art, especially new media art, is probably a legacy from my father. For ten years after World War 2, he worked as a professional photographer, and then learned electronics as part of a new job installing automatic-return bowling alley machines. He taught me both photography - especially darkroom work - and basic electronics when I was growing up. In many ways, photography is the oldest form of "new media art," a term that also includes cinema, video art, electronic music, and the currently proliferating forms of digital, or computerized, art. While I have been a photographer since I was an adolescent, I more recently became involved in creating art and working with artists in such virtual worlds as Second Life and OpenSim. Four years ago, I founded the Caerleon sims in Second Life, a virtual artists' colony of 30 artists from more than a dozen countries, as well as the nonprofit organization, Virtual Art Initiative, which has sponsored real world as well as online exhibitions of virtual art. I am also currently involved with creating art with computer game engines as well as the i-Pad and other digital tablets. This hands-on artistic work connects with my philosophical interests. I have published a number of articles on philosophy of music and the visual arts in magazines and journals in England, China, Mexico, and the United States, the introduction to a museum catalogue on American Indian art, and a chapter for a book that will be published next year by Oxford University Press, Handbook of Virtuality. My own work has been exhibited in galleries in the United States and Canada, as well as a museum in Florence, Italy. I curated the exhibition, Through the Virtual Looking Glass at the Harbor Gallery at UMass Boston in April, 2010.
On this page and its links, you can find art that I've made in five categories: photography,, photo-montages, immersive and interactive virtual art, machinimas (videos made in virtual environments), and art made with digital tablets, especially the i-Pad. I've also included links to my writings on music and art, and to artticles and websites about the Caerleon sims and Virtual Art Initiative.
The slide show above includes some of my photographs, still images of my virtual art, and some of the work I've been doing with the i-Pad. Below you can find links to my machinimas. For the rest, just follow the links in the column on the right.
