Brautigan Bibliography and Archive
A comprehensive, interactive information structure noted as the preeminent bio-bibliographic resource on the life and work of American writer Richard Gary Brautigan (1935-1984).

Begun in 1984, this body of work attempts to collect, connect, and overlay the scrambled, disparate, and hard to find scholarship and other assessments of Brautigan's legacy.

My methodology in developing and curating this project is largely topographical in that I conceptualize information as horizontal, spread thinly across a broad, flat surface. Knowledge, on the other hand, is the ability to structure, from this information, something more hierarchical and dimensional. The secret is to stretch or extend the body of information by making connections, or providing additional insight, throughout. The result is protusions in the flat surface. More protusions increases the opportunity for more connections, the development of a larger knowledge base, and enhanced understanding or appreciation of the subject.

As an online three dimensional "data hive," Brautigan Bibliography and Archive collects, connects and overlays disparate information sources with ethnographic research to provide an accurate, cross referenced accounting of Brautigan's life and his many novels, short story collections, poetry collections, spoken voice recordings, and non-fiction writing.

Yellow Cat Gallery & Media Lounge
An online gallery for digital media art by the students in the Digital Technology and Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. Each show generally features the works of four students co-curated by myself, and Dr. Dene Grigar, DTC Program Director.

"Visionary Landscapes: The Electronic Literature Organization Media Art Show"
North Bank Artists Gallery, Clark College, and Washington State University Vancouver
Vancouver, WA
May 29-June 1, 2008
(with Dene Grigar)

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Acousmatic refers to a sound one hears without being able to visualize its source. Acousmatic listening focuses on the act of hearing, and makes the "sonorous object" what we hear, not what is playing the sound (Pierre Schaeffer. "Acousmatics." Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner, eds. New York: Continuum, 2004. 76-81). With acousmatic listening we take interest in sounds for their own merit, refining our listening. Repeated listenings make us aware of our listening variations and our own subjectivity.

• "Granular Ambience" (2:17)
  
  
  
• "Singing Bowls" (1:00)
  
  
  

An audio narrative, in my thinking, tells a story using various sound files rather than relying on the spoken voices of multiple actors (see Radio Drama, below).

• "Dance with Tweeks and Whistles" (1:04) spans the cosmos and the history of computer technology. The computer music is some of the earliest created in 1951. The tweeks and whistles are very low frequency sounds created somewhere in the universe and recorded here on Earth.
  
  
  

Aural histories, in addition to vocal narratives, may include other sounds to provide context, background, and deeper, richer information about the topic or event of focus. In fact, the narrator's voice may be eliminated entirely, allowing the additional sounds to provide the narrative.

• "Voices of the Sixties" (6:00) mixes audio samples from political speeches and signature events to provide a personal, chronological, historical perspective of the politics, civil rights, space exploration, counterculture movement, and popular culture during the 1960s.
  
  
  

Found Sound describes audio objects created from modified sound files that are not normally considered art, often because they already have a non-art function. A good example is home recorded tapes or messages from telephone answering machines that often turn up in garage sales and thrift stores. Found sound provides an opportunity for both the artist and the audience to contemplate the original sound file(s), as well as their recombination. Much of the identity of found sound as an art form comes from the designation placed upon it by the individual artist.

• "Ghost Story" (1:26) combines an answering machine taped greeting with a home audio recording to produce unintended, but pleasing results.
  
  
  

Skills in digital audio production are often applied to more utilitarian pursuits. That does not mean, however, that these efforts have to be any less creative. A truly wonderful piece of audio draws no attention to itself, but immerses the listener in a cacoon of believable and participatory reality.

• "KOUGradio.com" (0:17) is a short "stinger" for the campus Internet radio station. We all made one in class. The station management loved us.
  
  
  

Radio, as an auditory medium, has the power to combine the human voice and other sounds to produce powerful narratives. At one time, radio drama was practiced as a high art. Today, sadly, not so much. For that reason, it's good to look back, listen, study, and appreciate what can be done with just a voice and some sounds.

• "War of the Worlds" (8:00) provides a condensed version of this famous 1938 radio drama. We studied this production in my Digital Audio class but I found student interest waned well before the program's end. I made this edited version so they could stay connected. Since then, I've learned how few people have actually listened to this performance from start to finish.
  
  
  

As DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid tells us, "lay one metaphor onto the other, remix, and press play. The sampling machine can handle any sound, and any expression. You just have to find the right edit points in the sound envelope—it's that structure thing come back as downloadable shareware for the information perplexed. . . . The remix becomes 'faction'" ("In through the Out Door." Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture. Paul Miller, ed. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. 6, 9). And, as Mark Amerika told me, "it's art about the future using the materials of now; people making up their lives, shape shifting, borrowing, moving through and around the bits of information, learning to navigate the virtual." (personal conversation).

• "Amen Air Raid Rain" (2:10) remixes the "Amen Break," an air raid siren, and Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain." The iconic amen break (the 6 second drum break from "Amen, Brother" by The Winstons, 1966) was sampled extensively in early hip-hop and sample-based music and is the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music. It exists in multiple forms and versions today. This is the original. The air raid siren is also a cultural icon, especially for those who lived through World War II in Europe, or the Cold War in America. Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain" features African American pentecostal preacher Brother Walter recorded January 1965 in San Francisco's Union Square. Walter begins with the story of Noah. Reich repeats and loops the phrase "it's gonna rain" throughout the original tape recording.
  
  
  

Soundscapes are layered audio recordings that attempt to present the multiple sounds one might hear in a particular immersive acoustic environment, real or imagined.

• "Soundscape 1" (1:30) combines various field recordings to represent a natural environment.
  
  
  
• "Voice of the Fair" (1:22) combines various field recordings to represent the ambience of a county fair.
  
  
  
• "Symphony for Antique Tractors" (1:00) combines various field recordings of antique tractors and other farm machinery made during a Heritage Days event.
  
  
  
• "Alien Operating Room" (0:53) is an attempt to create a fantasy soundscape. What sounds might one hear in an alien (as in intergalactic) operating room? Nobody knows, but we can imagine . . .
  
  
  

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"Song of the Earth Spirit" A series of digital photographs depicting the interconnectedness between Native Americans and their natural environment. This project began with analog color transparencies of portraits produced using a copy stand camera and landscapes taken with a hand-held Nikon FM SLR camera. These transparencies were overlain and manipulated by hand before being digitally rephotographed using a macro lens normally associated with extreme close up photography. The results, achieved entirely in camera and not through any image manipulation software, is that both original images appear on the same plane of focus, effectively blending one image with another. This reinforces the message of the project regarding the interconnectedness between these Native Americans and their environment.

Panoramic Landscapes
Multiple original images were taken by moving the camera along a predetermined plane at right angles to each scene. The resulting images were then combined and rephotographed in order to create the panoramic vistas not normally captured by cameras or the human eye. Each image is substantially reduced in size in order to facilitate its fit within the context of this webpage.


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Dr. John's Eazy-Peazy Guides
Web-based, award-winning tutorials for improving skills in writing, research, HTML, public speaking, and creative thinking.

Dr. John's Eazy-Peazy Guide to Creative Ideas was included in 101 Best Websites for Secondary Teachers (James Lerman. New York: International Society for Technology in Education, 2005), was featured in The Help Desk (1(6) June 21, 2002), an online newsletter supporting Kentucky education, and was selected by Encyclopedia Britannica as one of its "100 Best Websites for Teachers." Good Web Guide called Dr. John "perhaps the internet's most helpful lecturer."

"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Promoting Cybernetic Ecology in Writing Classrooms"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay examining preliminary theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological implications of cybernetic ecology, interpreted here as a productive interaction between people and computers.

"How in the World Can "Where in the World . . .?" Promote Second-Language Writing Skills?"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay exploring using problem solving computer games like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? to involve intermediate and advanced second language learners in reading, listening, researching, and decision making exercises – all of which can provide challenging, interesting, and meaningful contexts for improving second-language writing skills.

"Idealism, Pragmatism, Skepticism in 'Computers and Writing' at the Fin de Siècle"
Academic.Writing: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Communication across the Curriculum 1.1 Spring 2000.
A hypertext essay with Dene Grigar critiquing and analyzing the Town Hall Meetings at the Computers and Writing 1999 Conference. Builds on complex and disparate attitudes from multiple conference participants to build a multilayered, multivocal work consisting of three embedded webtexts: "Sequential Writing with Hyperlinks," "Interactive Webtext," and "Randomly Generated Text." Each offers a unique lens through which to view the Town Hall Meetings, while at the same time presenting the same information in different ways.

"The Way We Will Have Become: The Future (Histories) of Computers and Writing"
Kairos: A Journal for Teachers of Writing in Webbed Environments 3(2) Fall 1998.
A hypertext essay with Dene Grigar and Becky Rickley reporting on the first ever Town Hall Meetings at the Computers and Writing 1998 Conference. The purpose of this meeting was to explore the future of the computers and writing community, a pioneering group of academics who experimented with computers for research and teaching.