Have you found other artists on the Internet like yourself?

Other Internet artists like me are my greatest influence these days. There are many. Although I like to think that my work is similar to theirs – since they’ve been doing this work longer than I have.

My favorite living artists continuously do work that influence me more than anything else. They are Jeff Gompertz and Ricardo Dominguez. Their internet performance art is in my opinion the best example technology and art blended specifically for the cyberspace and fleshsapce. The commodity of cyberspace is communication. Jeff and Ricardo know this and include communication as a critical element in their I-net performance art. That said, I must add that Jeff is a brave man who frequents the unknown, which invites less than predictable outcomes, including participant’s computer crashing during a performance. But these men have taught me that the aesthetic of confusion and the recombinant forms that art pieces take as they get remixed in cyberspace is an integral part of the art of becoming.

My work is similar to many other artists. Adrianne Wortzel, aka Muse Eleanor, has been cyberdancing for years. Her more recent work has mixed multiple realities, as I will try to do in my Beckett installation. Francesca DeRimini, does some of the most beautiful, provocative, and erotic I-net art I’ve ever seen. Her “website as artwork” style, as well as Brad Siegfried’s, Diane Ludin’s, and G.H. Hovagimyan’s webart sites, have influenced my hypertext art style greatly.

Rolf van Gelder and I share a web based art creation style, more so that the others mentioned. My artwork is art similar to the artists I’ve mentioned, but my approach to creating the art by applying the technology at hand is much closer to Rolf’s. He’s a software engineer, so we share a background that enhances our digital art. We both understand that elegant code is also great art.

Is there anything about the way you produce your work that you believe to be
unique or unusual?

I don’t do any thing by hand. All of my art is based on digital imaging. I don’t create my art to be printed. It’s made to be viewed on a high quality graphics monitor and processed by a high quality graphics board.

My attention to detail is absurd. In every image I create, I zoom in at some point to edit individual pixels, precisely blending the pixels to create a very specific look. That means if you try to find the seams in an image where I’ve blended for example, sea foam & ocean waves with clouds in the sky – you will not be able to find the intersection of the 2 original images. (I want to refer to 2 images here: a detail called watersky.jpg, and the full image, called ihznudck.jpg)

My subject matter is rooted in the psychedelic daze way back when. So my electric and/or odd color combinations in dreamscapes may be considered unusual.

What style of art really makes you angry?

Angry? Life’s too short to let art anger me. Some art annoys me though, like ‘forms art’ or like jodi.com. I just don’t get it. Exploration is the way of the web, but I want to be rewarded for my exploration. I want more than scrolling code or blinking ASCII characters. Code is beautiful when elegantly implemented. Sometimes jodi gives me a pleasant reward. But usually the click isn’t worth the wait. I often feel like I'm looking at a screen from a bad day at work; a workday when there are too many crashes. I'm not happy to wait for that sort of visual to load.

Mostly the jodi pages bore me, but not always. Jodi's web pages that display user specific information are more interesting to me that the pages that invite me to click ambiguous spaces that link me to other ambiguous spaces. I also like the pages that repaint the screen as I drag the mouse. So sometimes I like to look at jodi's html to see how an effect is achieved. I don't like the pages that invite me to play with forms. But then I've never liked forms. I also don't like the pages that display code without context. Perhaps the UI serves as context for some people. But I've seen far too much code and too many coredumps to find 'framed' computer code interesting.

Do you ever expect to get rich/richer out of art?

Rich – no. Richer, maybe. I mean, if I make any money at all that’s technically ‘richer’, right? I have sold some digi-art, had some commissioned projects, and do freelance. So I have made some money from my artwork. But nothing compared to what I made as a technical manager or software consultant.

Was art your first love or do you have another passion?

I have always wanted to be an artist, but I had ideas that I couldn't express at the time. In high school I painted psychedelic posters and drew portraits for friends. I knew that I wanted to transition to dream-like images and to time-based media, but for years I didn't know how to do so.

Working with computers daily, I often wished I was working with computer graphics, but felt I had to stay on a career path which had little to do with art. I allowed occasional creative outlets through costume making and gardening. But mostly I just worked really hard and advanced my career.

One November morning, four yrs ago, I realized I was a digital artist trapped in a Fidelity Project Manager's body. This simple realization changed my life. I had been listening to Public Radio, and heard that one could get set up to do digital art for about $6,000. I knew I would buy the equipment, because I've wanted to create kinetic art for about 20 years. That day I began telling people I would soon be creating digital images. And spending 30 min /day moving toward that goal.

Two years later I was the Resident Artist at DoWhile.

What would you like to be better at, and why?

I would like to take interactivity to a new level in my art. I want to create art sites that are interactive in much more dynamic ways. This will require learning more javascript and java. I want to make dynamic webart like Sawad Brooks. I also want to get back into VRML and learn web animation tools, like Flash.

carmin