• The Cyberbull Drawings - A post-ego project by Doctor Hugo: The artist can no longer produce the limits of his own being, and reflect himself; he is only an absorbent screen, a spinning and sensible plate for all the networks of influence.
  
  
• Rock Art: dance - a hypermedia work by Barry Smylie, Ryan Douglas, David Lee, and Janus (Janice Langley).

• Broken Record
• Projection

My career as a writer, if one can call it that, has included arts journalism, travel writing, and 10 years writing a column of social commentary. As a photographer I have produced two major projects [ both documentary in nature and now housed in archives collections ], many photo-essays in newspapers, literary journals and magazines. I have written one non-fiction book and exhibited visual art in a dozen or so galleries. I have also made mixed media constructions fashioned from found objects, some of which are in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

In the beginning I focused on my home place on the Canadian prairies. And, until about 10 years ago, I imagined my life would be spent doing pretty much the same thing. I examined and reflected upon my place in the vast landscape and history of the Canadian West. This was only natural because I came to aesthetic practices not through schooling, but from the farms, ranches, and orchards. I became an artist because, after many years of itinerant work, I was essentially unemployable. I supported my practice through freelance writing, bartending, and casual work in libraries.

I was happy enough with the routine. But, after a year in Europe and Asia Minor [ photographing tombs and sarcophagi ], I returned home to find writers and poets and artists wrestling with the same things. Chasing publications, exhibitions, grants. It all suddenly seemed very depressing and dull. So I packed my belongings and moved with my partner to Vancouver Island. A place entirely out of my orbit.

I bought a computer and went online. It wasn't long before I discovered the trAce community, which had recently changed from an email list to an O'Reilly webboard. Sceptical and a bit frightened at first, I joined the webboard and began to use digital tools to create small works, poetic in nature. For lack of a better name, browser art.

trAcers encouraged me, particularly Alan Sondheim, who had just come onboard as Writer-in-Residence; and English writer and netizen Pauline Masurel, also known as Mazzy. Really, though, everyone on the trAce webboard was very open and generous with comments and criticism.

It is very odd to think about how completely and suddenly I shucked traditional aesthetic pursuits and immersed myself in internet culture - most specifically, the web. Even the landscape I spent so long romancing has almost vanished from memory, replaced by a landscape of ideas and networks. Although not a programmer, I have come to know my [ third ] computer as well as I know any person. Friends and colleagues are almost all now linked to it in a very real way. After 10 years I am finally producing digital work that approaches the condition of art [ though I hesitate to define that condition ].

There are things that haven't changed, though. I still work with found objects and my approach to art is more intuitive and physical than intellectual. I have to feel that something works on an aesthetic level, rather than think about what it is conceptually. I make no excuses for that. Although I have a great interest in theory and critical thinking, I am still that person who wandered in from the landscape. Presently, I feel shat out the other side. Almost. But that’s another story.

In his book Other Voices, Essays on Modern Poetry, back in 1990, Octavio Paz wrote: "Another art is dawning." He wrote of a tradition that “began with the Romantics, reached its zenith with the Symbolists, and attained a fascinating twilight with the avant-garde of the last century.” I don't think he imagined digital poetics being the new art, and I don't think we even know if it is a new art, or even a new way of writing.

There seem at least two major schools of thought about the revolutionary nature of new media. Some believe it is ushering in the "late age of print"; others believe it is “breaking completely with precedents in print and older forms of media.” I can embrace the former but not the latter, which I find preposterous. Anyway, something seems in the process of taking shape.

I am in mid-leap, suspended between traditional and so-called new media. As facile as working with digital tools can often feel, there is something very exciting about the way one can layer image upon image, text upon text. Remix. Rework. Particularly the ability to layer or clone or manipulate imagery in seconds – things that take hours upon hours in the darkroom, if you could accomplish them at all.

The notions of failure or wasting time seem ridiculous because you can move with ease backward and forward through the digital process. Also the sense of what you create as an object is very different. The object is less precious, more fluid, discardable, adaptable. In short working with digital tools is more like play. Editing images becomes more like editing words.

One computer or another has betrayed my trust - corrupted or eaten something in mid-process. I once lost an entire website of animated texts and imagery. I know that imagery posted on the web will not look the same on every monitor. As a visual artist, one must adopt a new frame of mind when using computers to create aesthetic work, or browsers to present it on the web.

I write and create imagery for what Paz called the immense minority, or maybe Stendhal's happy few. I like to think that my work is accessible to my neighbours - people with little or no exposure to the creative arts.

Another thing about audience that fascinates me is statistics, which are relatively easy to access with a web site. While organizing this talk I telephoned several library systems in Canada to ask how many people had borrowed my book. Although the comparison is flawed because I can never know how many people stood in library stacks and leafed through Eternal Prairie - the ratio of people who borrowed my book to the number of people who spent 10 minutes or more browsing my online studio, is 300:1 in favour of this website.

Given the amount of effort that has gone into creating this online studio, 300:1 is a heartening statistic.

Thank you for visiting.