welcome to
t a l l a h a s s e e b e a c h
I am a constant dabbler in the creative and technical arts, happiest when I'm making something.
Pretentious Artist Statement: My work is grounded in environmental communication, visual rhetoric, rhetorics of museums and monuments, and gender theory. It blends an exploration of the strange, queer, and weird with a foundation in geographical place and the natural world, and is expressed in words, images, and other media.
I can be reached at jsclarkfl@pm.me and mastodon social.
written work:
I write weird fiction. I maintain a substack site, The Immersible: Dispatches from Tallahassee Beach, and have started using it to publish (and re-publish) my work.
Academic publications include a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks (see CV link below). One paper, a "fictional autoethnography" about gender performance in virtual worlds called Virtually Queer, delights me by continuing to get more attention than just about anything else I’ve published in academia. Another personal fave is Remediating the Stars: Rob Wright’s ‘Watch the World(s)’ Machinima, on hypermediation and Vincent Van Gogh, which won a Top Paper award at the 2012 convention of the National Communication Association.
I blogged and tweeted pretty regularly between 2005-2015 when I was up to my eyeballs in what we grandly called New Media. Much of that deathless prose is archived at Virtually Natural, which provides an often unintentionally amusing look at all the things that were emerging then.
I've written and edited a wide variety of technical, academic, and educational materials over the years (see CV link below). Some of my essays--formal and otherwise--can be found on the weblog What've I Done?.
visual/spatial work:
Photography. Long an outlet, with a focus on personal travel and Florida’s natural environments. Most of this work is published at Simulacra, my Flickr account (embedded at right). I also cross-post these to a Facebook page and to Mastodon.
Dioramas and Scale Models. When COVID and retirement hit, I leapt back into childhood and started building models, primarily in 1:25 and 1:144 scale: airplanes, rockets, railroads, and automobiles (particularly antique VWs, a longtime interest in 1:1 scale). It's been very rewarding to reignite this hobby with an adult's patience.
Mixed Media. I've also made a few Nature-oriented pieces for my home.
Virtual Environments. I've built three-dimensional, immersive virtual spaces in platforms like Second Life, culminating in a now-archived OpenSim project intended to evoke the idea of "Florida." A video tour is embedded at right. You can also view a rough draft video tour of an OpenSim-based virtual FSU campus that I created as a sabbatical project. Building in these spaces is an enjoyable blend of coding, modeling, and visual art. I've also made related multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima (see CV link below).
Gardening (IRL) with native plants continues to intrigue—which, while not primarily done as visual expression, does yield aesthetic, ecophilial, and scopic pleasure. And after all, gardens are rhetorical.
performance work:
I frequently perform my literary works at open mics and other venues. Here's a recent example, performing Wisteria Blue. I've begun playing guitar and singing covers at open mics as well, and hope to continue developing things in that direction with some originals.
I've done many theatrical and vocal performances in musical theatre and choral groups in the past, none of which--for better or worse--were documented for posterity. You'll have to trust me on this one.
bio:
I enjoy traveling, drinking craft beer, and listening to live music with my stunning and brilliant mate Nancy; being in the outdoors (particularly camping and water-related activities); and visiting with friends and family—including my two outstanding daughters and two objectively excellent grandchildren. Not necessarily in that order.
Professionally, I retired from the faculty at Florida State University in 2020 after a long career teaching Human Communication and consulting in instructional technology and online learning, primarily on college campuses. A Curriculum Vitae (alt link) provides professional details and links. In 2014, I completed a Ph.D. in Communication with an emphasis in environmental rhetoric and new media. My dissertation was a critical/interpretive project on the way the natural world is represented in virtual ones—and the resulting ambiguities in the meanings of "natural," "virtual," and "real." As you might imagine, I had a fecking ball with it.
coda:
So why Tallahassee Beach? Way back in the pre-Interwebz 1990s, I invented the name for my short-lived, satirical SF series set in Florida’s capital in the 23rd Century, when the rising Gulf of Mexico has brought its surf to the outskirts of town. The series appeared in the long-defunct local print periodical, Q Magazine. Then the Web came along, and that beachy name was an obvious choice for my own web-surfing personal website in the 1990s, from which this page descends. The name eventually even washed up on the virtual shores of the metaverse, in that OpenSim project described above. Just remember: No hay playa, Playa.