I grew up in the middle of Alaska. When I was finished, I peddled video games there. Then, I started pushing buttons on the Internet to make it a better place to be. Along the way, I began making photos and movies.
I currently study at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale where I am pursuing an MFA in mass communication and media arts with an emphasis in cinema and photography. Since 2003, I have focused my artistic capital toward narrative and experimental filmmaking, with a preference for writing, directing, and editing. My two short narrative films, Gerald In Fall and A.J., were adaptations of 100-word news stories that circulated the Internet during the early growth period of social network websites like Facebook and MySpace. The role of social media in shaping society’s reactions to current events and popular culture at large is of specific interest to me as an artist. My films select, expand, and embellish the reality of two of these digested and forgotten hyperlinks while interrogating an Internet audience’s growing inability to access society’s narratives through emotional resonance or charitable human concern. I intend to renew this academic and artistic interest in future endeavors while finding new and challenging strategies for my art that exist outside Hollywood industrial practices.
During the last few years, my artistic projects were all made in an effort to work as far outside of narrative fiction as possible. Specifically, I have focused on structural notions of identity and emotion as well as the role of new media and the Internet in contemporary art. Assuming this endeavor proves profitable, I will make a return to narrative in time to produce a successful thesis in 2012.
