About Me/How to Read This Blog

Past artists have often used “After Nature” as a title for still-life or “nature study”. “After Nature” seems more of a historical period to me now, and so I am after nature in another way. This site serves as an evolutionary place for my thesis to grow out of. It is called “Art, Nature and the Virtual Environment” and my proposal for research is to re-present a children’s school yard garden that came out of my work with Canadian Organic Growers/ Growing Up Organic program and my work as an artist.

Eco-art helps me to intervene in a “non-instrumental” way- which means not just growing things but growing with them as another possibility.

HOW TO READ THIS BLOG

First off, you don’t really “read” a blog in the traditional start to finish, narrative sense. There’s no developed plot line, no trajectory. The author (me) has only a vague idea of where I am going. The real plot happens between blogs.

However, a blog is read backwards in time. Blog entries are from the latest to the earliest, if you look at them sequentially, but this is not really how one “reads” a blog. On the right hand side of entries are lists of links and categories. The CATEGORIES are important. Everytime someone does a blog entry, it is tagged into a category so that if you click on “escapelot”, for instance, you’ll get a bunch of entries aggregated around the idea of “escapelot”. If you choose eco-art, you’ll get the blogs I’ve tagged and categorized as such. It’s like a file of stories around one theme, that might add up, or not.

If you click on the monthly archives, you get to see what I was preoccupied with that month (backwards, of course). Or you could just look at the category “site videos” and watch movies– not do any reading at all.

In a way, it is you (dear reader) who writes the meaning into the blog. It’s not a storyline, but a web of events that you construct as you jump around the site. When words are highlighted, you can click on them and they will link to another aspect of my research, or what I am thinking of when I include that word or idea.

Other links on the right hand side join you to the hyper text transfer protocol (http) of other sites which inform what I am doing, (or think I am doing).

One last thing, wordpress and other blog publishers give bloggers a template to use, so the form doesn’t vary much, unless you’re a master of the medium. Which I am not. I am blundering along as a naif.