Illumination Gallery has another
links page wherein I pay homage to 5 artists/writers who had a deep
influence on shaping who I am. This links page is personal. I am
composing it in the form of a blog because it represents more than just
a set of links to places online.
No one is more responsible for the web evolving into an all-pervasive
medium than Ted
Nelson. His masterful 1974 book, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, served as a
rallying cry for harnessing personal computers as tools of artistic
expression. Ted Nelson is perhaps best known for coining the terms
hypertext and hypermedia. In the end, the web reduces itself to those
two words. Thus in putting up a new links page for Illumination Gallery
it is only fitting that the first link be to the man who for all intents
and purposes invented the notion of the online link. In 2000 I
interviewed Ted Nelson for an article I wrote.
I met Lance
Strate online via the poetry community on MySpace. As a poet
Lance feeds off our media environment. Not only did I discover that
Lance and I had similar takes on electronic media, but we grew up in
roughly the same timeframe in neighborhoods in Queens, New York quite
near one another. I was initially drawn toward Lance purely on the basis
of the poetry he posted on his MySpace profile page. Then I became aware that
Lance is a founder the Media Ecology Association and has served as that
organization's President since its inception. Lance is also currently
the executive director of the Institute of General Semantics, founded by Alfred Korzybski. Reading up on media ecology and
general semantics helped me bring my overall vision of media into a
clearer perspective.
Poetry is the prism through which I view/conceptualize our starkly
visual culture. Two modern poets whose work has inspired me are Harlean
Carpenter and Jaey Peele. Harlean Carpenter describes herself as a poet,
a model, and an instigator. Her website and MySpace
page reveal a talented writer with a sharp wit & an
intelligent/beautiful model who understands the stylistic nuances of pop
culture. Jaey Peele and I share an affinity for haiku poetry. His
writings (both on his blog and MySpace page)
offer terse, crystallized insights.