Stamps, interactive toys
In my talks I often pause to give people a “mental sorbet” to clear their minds before I go on to the next substantive topic: I show these toys. I wrote them following my rather dogmatic 1979-80 theoretical stance on work I was contemplating; I thought that if a computer-based artwork is to truly engage the medium for its unique capabilities (e.g. interaction) it must cease to exist when people cease to interact with it. So these all start black, then fade to black when you stop playing with them (except for the last, built as a reimplementation of someone else’s concept. After making a few of them, I realized that they were not art, even if they were engaging, so I trivialized them by calling them “toys” and “stamps”; I stick by that characterization, even though scores of people have released even more trivial work decades later as capital-F, capital-A Fine Art. They’ll recant with suitable embarrasment if they ever learn that titallation is not the same as meaning. I mainly wrote them to see if I could visually engage people in a non-narrative way (I'm a big fan of the Structuralist filmmakers), and when I learned I could I wanted to figure out why I could, which led to my deeper exploration of both vision and meaning. Here's a file with an executable Java .jar file and source code. Please let me know if you download, use, or add to it.

William Morris desktop images
I deeply respect William Morris’ balance of nature and design, so I often create bitmap images of his work, laboriously reworking things in Photoshop to seamlessly match when they’re tiled. I learn by having things like this in front of me for months or years; sometimes you have to live with something to truly appreciate the genius in the subtleties. I've linked full-sized versions to these downscaled images; click to the a full-sized one & use your browser (right-click in Windows) to set one as a background. Again, let me know if they’re useful so when I make more I’ll post them.