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Donna Leishman |
Jason Nelson |
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Donna, you have come from both an art school and a commercial background. How do these experiences relate to your Flash work?My art background exposed me to the differences between applied and experimental artifacts. As an undergraduate student, my interests somewhat problematically seemed to span disciplines. For example, I studied Illustration and Printmaking but worked at different points in porcelain and paint, creating sculptural works and 5 foot drawings. The computer was simply used to help present these unconventional illustrations in a folio. The aesthetic and emotional tone of my work seemed more like "Fine Art," however I found this still wasn't a good fit—at that time Fine Art had taken a decidedly conceptual, minimalist, and installation turn. Three important finds came out of this period—my interest in folkloric subject matter, the sequential arts, and the sense that I was an artist placed between existing fields. My commercial grounding was fortuitously timed as I began an internship in a Scottish new media company at the forefront of web and screen-based design. Once there, I was exposed to an entirely different world of clients and short deadlines, a place where research and the personal voice were for the most part redundant. What I did learn was how to meet a deadline and plan work—importantly, how to map out large interactive websites. Many of the senior designers in this company were avidly publishing experimental "personal" websites, often using Director and a new software called Macromedia [now Adobe] Flash. In Flash I found a tool that encouraged me to return to my art school themes. I found that there was very little web work being done in visual narrative or folk tales that experimented with sequences and that used meaningful interactivity. After a spell working in a New York animation studio (Bullseyeart), I finally returned to Scotland to complete a Masters in Design where I produced RedRidinghood. Until very recently commercial freelance work plus a PhD stipend has literally paid for me to have a freer reign in the time I spend researching and developing projects. This has enabled me to invest substantial periods of time into my projects. |
Interview QuestionsBiographical BackgroundReception | Role of the ReaderInterfaceWork ProcessElectronic Literature CommunityFuture WorkSecretsSpace | StateConnect Digital | MaterialGamesPotentials of the FieldEssaysThe Artists on Each Other's WorkTalan Memmott's Commentary on Each ArtistLaunch the ArtworksDeviantLeishman SitePandemic RoomsNelson IndexBiographical InformationStephanie StricklandMajorie Coverley LuesebrinkDonna LeishmanJason NelsonTalan Memmott |
Jason, from Australia, where you miss snow, you've lately been searching E-Bay for abandoned high schools to buy on the plains of the North American Midwest. Also, you are trained as a cultural geographer and once planned a project for the Oklahoma River. How do these experiences relate to your Flash work and to the Midwestern themes in a lot of that work?I am an amateur. A city planner just long enough to play with landscapes. A cultural geographer long enough to know that buildings are text and telephone wires are interfaces that sway before clouds, and wind, the wind driven wave of an empty highway. Within my MFA (Bowling Green State University) I was all shambles and circling drunk, my writing largely ignored as senseless, nonsensical, lisping. Even my early play with technology was through the temporary self- exposure of trial versions and online help guesses. I've never been convinced of anything, never felt a static and confident understanding about any particular association, or event or truth. Not meaning to be obtuse, but these lines are shadows to a unique Midwestern, or southwestern, or central or plains or prairie understanding of the world. In many ways I grew up in a land of failure, of oddball attempts at town building and rushed soil tillage. A place of lost/broken/rebuilt cultures, flora built by buffalo herds, fire, and tight and twisting storms. I find people, groups of people, uncomfortable; most who grow up on the plains do. It is the next bend, the hidden house and open openness, the lack of specific rules or enforced speed limits that allures. And yes, I've been searching for old High Schools to buy. These are old gothic buildings with full gyms and theaters and all you will need for a grand cult or arts colony. The trick is they are located in northwestern Kansas towns of a few hundred people, hours away from the nearest anything. The dream of course is to build a little sequestered world, classrooms as diversions, hallways for journeying, a new media installation on the basketball court. Many of the e-lit kids I virtually play with are also aligned with this isolated amateur identity. Untrained and driving late seventies Chevy trucks through mid-fall snows 50 miles to buy wireless adapters and discounted surplus monitors from the nearest county seat. From Panhandle This same sense of amateurism (not used in the common "poor quality" way, but in the more accurate "just not certificate trained in anything in particular") and isolation not only makes for some gloriously inventive and far-reaching works of literature, but it also makes the genre very fragile. When I moved from Geographer to Poet, I never guessed I would be creating e-poems, interactive fictions. It was only my complete frustration with the BGSU MFA program, combined with an interest in spatial computing spurred by my City Planning GIS days, that lured my interest in 2000 (last year of my MFA). If e-lit continues to be dominated by those from quirky backgrounds and discontinued lives are we simply going to dwindle from a lack of copulation? Or will the conditions change and those better adjusted to city life and proper learning processes start thinking of digital worlds as homes for poetical and fictionary critters. Somehow this question of background twisted into my thoughts on the future of e-lit. Excuse my backroads mentality, but we all end up at the lake eventually. |
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