welcome to

t a l l a h a s s e e     b e a c h

Joe Clark is a constant dabbler in the creative and technical arts, happiest when he's making something.

Pretentious Artist's Statement: J.S. Clark's 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.

He may be reached at jsclarkfl@pm.me and mastodon social.

written work:

Clark writes weird fiction. He maintains a Substack site, The Immersible: Dispatches from Tallahassee Beach, and has started using it to publish (and re-publish) his work.

Not everything he writes is fiction, though some of it is still weird. Academic publications include a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks (detailed in the curriculum vitae). One paper, a "fictional autoethnography" about gender performance in virtual worlds called Virtually Queer, delights him by continuing to get more attention than just about anything else he’s 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 a convention of the National Communication Association.

As one did back then, Clark blogged and tweeted pretty regularly between 2005-2015 when he was up to his eyeballs in what was 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.

He's written and edited a wide variety of technical, academic, and educational materials over the years. Some of his essays--formal and otherwise--can be found on the weblog What've I Done?.

visual/spatial work:

Photography has long been an outlet, with a focus on personal travel and Florida’s natural environments. Most of this work is published in the Flickr account Simulacra and typically cross-posted to a Facebook page and to Mastodon.

Mixed Media. He's also made a few Nature-oriented pieces for his home.

Dioramas and Scale Models. When COVID and retirement hit, Clark 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). He finds it both nostalgic and rewarding to reignite this hobby with an adult's patience.

Virtual Environments. Clark has 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 he created as a sabbatical project. He finds that building in these spaces is an enjoyable blend of coding, modeling, and visual art. He's also made related multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima.

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:

Clark frequently performs his written work at open mics and other venues. Here's a recent example, performing Wisteria Blue. He has begun playing guitar and singing covers at open mics as well, and hopes to continue developing things in that direction with some originals.

He's 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 him on this one.

bio:

A sixth-generation Floridian, Clark enjoys traveling, drinking craft beer, and listening to live music with his stunning and brilliant mate Nancy; being in the outdoors (particularly camping and water-related activities); and visiting with friends and family—including his two outstanding daughters and two objectively excellent grandchildren. Not necessarily in that order.

Professionally, he 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 (see CV). In 2014, he completed a Ph.D. in Communication with an emphasis in environmental rhetoric and new media. His 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, he had a fecking ball with it.

coda:

So why Tallahassee Beach? Way back in the pre-Interwebz 1990s, he invented the name for a 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 his 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.