Sea-Changes A Meta-Biography Produced by Myron Turner

Sea-Changes is a collaborative biography project for artists in their 50's and up. Artist here is broadly defined to include visual artists, video, sound, and performance artists, composers, media and computer-based artists, etc. The project involves several stages.

1. The collaborating artists will contribute autobiographical materials to a common database. These materials will consist of texts and images. The texts can be memoirs, thoughts about art, etc., which may be and in many cases probably will be fragmentary. The images, which must eventually be digitized for display on the computer, may be of anything relevant to the artist's life and art; the most obvious items are family photos and slides of artwork, the artist's own, influences, examples, etc. But even such things as documents and newpaper items can be scanned as images.
2. As soon as there's enough material in the database, each artist will begin to construct an autobiography or "metabiography" from these materials, using anything in the database but excluding the artist's own contributions. The material contributed to the database will not be identified by gender or individual, though some of it will obviously imply or reveal these identifications. The point is to find our own lives in the lives of others, regardless of gender or individual boundaries.

   The artists will be free to develop their own approaches to creating their biographies, inventing, adding, and subtracting images, texts, and documents, wherever they see fit. But one of the implications of the project is that there will be inevitable overlappings: various artists will be using varying amounts of the same materials from the database. Each individual metabiography, then, will be one aspect of the larger metabiography of all the participating artists, which is what Sea-Changes finally will be.

3. In the final stages of the project, Sea-Changes will be given a public interface on the World Wide Web. This will be in the form of a 3-D icon, which represents the totality and integration of all of the lives which have gone into the making of Sea-Changes . By clicking on an area of the icon, the viewer will call up one of the biographies which makes up the greater life of the whole.

   The public interface will be posted on the Web before many of the biographies have been completed. An important conceptual aspect of the Web is that it is always open to revision, always in some sense under construction. So, changes, updates, etc. may be made at any time. A practical benefit of this to the participating artists is that there is no formal deadline for completing the individual metabiographies. And, another practical note should be added here: none of the participating artists will be expected to have any special technical knowledge or technical facilities, apart from a Web browser and an Internet connection (which presumably you already have if you are reading this). You will not, for instance, need to know how to make Web pages; these will be generated automatically for you as part of a shared, common interface.

How Sea-Changes got started Who I am The Drawings

Some conceptual   background

How to participate in   Sea-Changes

Sea-Changes at the Banff Centre

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