well, this is it. my very first post on my brand new, wet-behind-the-ears site... for about 7 years i've had a basic website with a selection of my work built in dreamweaver with photoshop slices. pretty simple stuff. i rarely updated it and certainly never used it as tool for discussion.
enter patricia ackerman and joshua "red" russak. joshua, an enterprising wordpress developer, contacted me after seeing some of my work and offered to help me update my online portfolio (he explains it well here). agreeing, i approached patricia, an amazingly thoughtful and intuitive interactive designer, and the three of us got to work. i couldn't be more pleased with the result - thank you guys!
but as exciting as a new site with 2.0 functionality is, as those who know me know well, i've viewed the "broadcasting" of oneself with trepidation in times past. what's changed, you ask?
well, in a sense, not much. i don't plan to use this space as a diary and i don't plan to reveal every last detail of my private life to the spider-bots endlessly crawling the web. i intend this space to be a record of my work, for both love and money, as well as a curated selection of observations that others might find interesting. (that's you, mom)
but one thing did change: for as long as i can remember i have defined "art" as that which somehow engages the world in conversation and an "artist" as someone engaged in a dialogue through their work. often, this is a dialogue on the human condition or the nature of beauty but it's the conversation that matters more than the content. believing that and recognizing the exploding potential of genuine conversations - not just trivial chatter or marketing nonsense - growing around social media tools, it seemed time to engage.
i smile as i write this realizing how many similar posts must exist at the head of every newbie's blog hatched onto the inter-webs. someone explaining, to no one in particular, why and how they came to first tack their thoughts onto the global bulletin board. someone with better coding acumen than i should write a program to collect the first blog entry of every blog and curate them into an online exhibit (i think that's you twhid!). that would be an interesting online art project...
and so it begins... feel free to sign up at the right or check back from time to time to see what i've been doing or thinking. i'll do my best to be succinct, genuine and useful.
thanks... sorrel