picnic

welcome to

t a l l a h a s s e e     b e a c h

your host:

I am a constant dabbler in the creative and technical arts, happiest when I am making something. Coming from a disciplinary base of environmental communication, visual rhetoric, rhetorics of museums and monuments, and gender theory, my work blends an exploration of the strange, queer, and weird, with a grounding in geographical place and the natural world, expressed through words, images, and other media.

literary:

I write weird fiction and have a loosely structured, ongoing Florida-based project that I am currently adapting to make it more accessible and engaging online. For now, here are a few samples:

You can read more here.

Academic publications include a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks (see CV). One paper, a "fictional autoethnography" about gender performance in virtual worlds called Virtually Queer, continues to get more attention than just about anything else I’ve published in academia. I find this deeply satisfying. 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 below). Some of my essays--formal and otherwise--can be found on the weblog What've I Done?.

visual:

Amateur photography has long been 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), though I've also recently been experimenting with Pixelfed.

I build dioramas and scale models, primarily in 1:25 and 1:144 scale: airplanes, rockets, railroads, and automobiles (particularly antique VWs, a longtime interest in 1:1 scale).

I've made a few Nature-oriented mixed-media pieces for my home.

I've built three-dimensional, immersive virtual environments in virtual spaces like Second Life, culminating in a now-archived OpenSim project intended to evoke the idea of "Florida." A video tour is embedded at right below. You can also view a rough draft video tour of an OpenSim virtual FSU campus that I created as a sabbatical project.

Relatedly, I've made multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima (see CV).

Gardening with native plants continues to intrigue—which, while not primarily done for visual expression, does yield aesthetic, ecophilial, and scopic pleasure. And after all, gardens are rhetorical.

performing:

I frequently perform my literary works at open mics and other venues.

I've done many 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.

My guitar playing, while enthusiastically engaged, is not yet ready for prime time.

background:

Generally speaking, when I'm not making stuff, I enjoy traveling, being in the outdoors (particularly camping and water-related activities), drinking craft beer, listening to live music, and visiting with friends and family—including my two objectively excellent grandchildren. Not necessarily in that order.

I retired from the faculty at Florida State University in 2020 after a long career teaching Communication and consulting in instructional technology and online learning, primarily on college campuses. A Curriculum Vitae provides professional details and links. In 2014, I was awarded 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 came up with 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.