Narrative Bio (v2)

Since the early 1980’s my creative interests have been driven by my personal dual passions of photographic and computer technology. This has led to recent research in the area of the technological pastoral in an attempt to see how technology and pastoral ideals can complement each other, or if its impossible for the two to co-exist. Over the past year I have focused on the art of internal computer design to determine whether or not designers of systems had a sense of artistic and/or aesthetic intent when designing the logic boards of computers.

I’ve been documenting my experiences through photography since I was a little child. What started as mainly color memory photographs with point-and-shoot cameras turned into black and white explorations of light and dark using manual SLR cameras with interchangeable lenses while a student in College. I began using digital cameras in 1998, and have been shooting digital full-time since 2000. After years of working with chemicals and light in darkrooms, the move to a digital darkroom workflow has been a breath of fresh air and has provided me with an opportunity to manipulate my imagery in a way that I never expected would be possible. One of the reasons I decided to return to school for my MFA degree was to investigate what impact the expanding access to digital cameras and software to manipulate those images has done to our collective perception. In what ways has the proliferation of digitally manipulated images had an effect on humanity’s trust of photographic images?

My other passion, computer technology, is actually a by-product of my early interest in electronic gadgets. As a young child I wasn’t satisfied simply putting together the electric train set, I needed to know how it worked by taking all the components apart and putting them back together, piece-by-piece. I treated my first computer this way, and to this day continue to feel very comfortable taking advanced technology apart in an effort to get a low-level understanding of how all the parts work and work together. My 25+ years of interest in personal computer technology is what drives my current research into computer design and into exposing, through interactive art installations, the black box that is the inside of computers.