t a l l a h a s s e e     b e a c h*

joseph   s.   c l a r k

About:

Retired from the faculty at Florida State University in May 2020 after a long career, primarily on college campuses, teaching Communication and consulting in instructional technology and distance learning.

Terminal degree: Ph.D. in Communication (2014) with an emphasis in environmental rhetoric and new media. A few publications, including a journal article, book chapters, and invited talks, as well as unconventional things like multimedia Prezis and an award-winning machinima. 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."

A Curriculum Vitae provides details and links.

Related Activities/Interests:

Writer. Experienced writer/editor of technical and educational materials; author of fiction and essays, generally in the vein of magical realism and weird tales. Highlight: "and certain stars shot madly from their spheres," published in the Apalachee Review. Very occasionally post short blog bits—usually something weird.

Amateur photographer. I especially enjoy photographing Florida's natural environment and documenting my travels. My Flickr feed is where most of my work ends up. Simulacra seems an appropriate handle for my photographic work because of all the things I’ve read by people like Baudrillard, Benjamin, and Barthes: photographs lie.

Dabbler in virtual worlds. The dissertation project led to explorations of visual rhetoric in immersive, three-dimensional virtual spaces, culminating in a currently-offline OpenSim project intended to evoke "Florida." See a video tour. You can also view a draft video tour of an OpenSim virtual FSU campus that I created.

Personal:

When I can pry myself away from the damned screens, I like to paddle, snorkel, bodysurf, wander around behind the little animals, visit with friends and family, act, sing, and make feeble guitar noises. Since retirement I've been fiddling with scale models again. I’ve owned, maintained, and restored a lot of antique Volkswagens but sold my last one in 2023. Currently rather obsessed with gardening and native plants.

I can be reached by emailing jsclarkfl at gmail.

*Tallahassee Beach won't be found on your maps, pilgrim. It was originally the name of an abortive, satirical SF series set in Florida’s capital in the 23rd Century, when the Gulf of Mexico has reached the outskirts of town. It appeared in the long-defunct print periodical, Q Magazine, back in the 20th Century—when people were using a thing called paper. When I built my first personal website in the 1990s, that beachy name was an obvious choice for my own web-surfing homepage. The name eventually even washed up on the virtual shores of the metaverse, in the OpenSim project described above.