vita


narrative |  1  2  3  4  5  6  7



4. the place and Its Legacy



In the mid-1990s, I began developing what would become one of the first serious works of digital art built for the web. The project was called the place, and it emerged at a time when most online content was institutional, commercial, or experimental in a strictly technical sense. My vision was different. I saw the internet as a poetic space, as a medium for memory, reflection, intuition, and nonlinear experience.



the place wasn’t a story in the traditional sense. It was a system: a constellation of images, text fragments, and navigational loops that mirrored how memory works – not as a line, but as a drift. Visitors didn’t move through plot points but through psychic terrain, assembling meaning by wandering. The interface was minimalist, the pacing deliberate. It was a meditation, not a spectacle.



The first work I published within the place was Life With Father, a quiet, interior piece that reflected on the emotional texture of childhood and the complexity of paternal presence. It was stark, unresolved, personal. It set the tone for everything that followed: an embrace of fragment over narrative arc, presence over performance.



Over the next few years, I continued building out the place — adding works, refining its architecture, letting the system evolve. As the web changed, so did the cultural conversation around digital art. Design code evolved, bandwidth expanded, new tools emerged. But I never treated technology as the point. It was always a vessel for emotional resonance.



A later work published at the place was Urban Diary, a piece that pushed the original concepts further outward. Where Life With Father looked inward, Urban Diary looked outward, toward the city, the ambient flow of everyday life, the layered simultaneity of movement and memory. It was composed of multiple modular fragments: photographs, micro-narratives, observations, all designed to recombine and loop in unexpected ways. Like its predecessors, it refused closure. It asked the viewer not to finish, but to return.



the place was always a solo project. It was my studio, my sketchbook, my essay. It allowed me to test ideas that didn’t fit neatly into art galleries or academic journals. And it became a model for how digital space could be something more than delivery, a site of quiet, sustained attention.



Looking back, I see the place not just as an early experiment in web-based art, but as a conceptual foundation. The themes I explored there – nonlinearity, fragmentary memory, user-driven navigation — would evolve into more expansive forms in works like Flagrant World. But the core ideas were already in place. The screen was not a window, it was a landscape; a space to drift, to remember – to assemble, dis-assemble, and re-assemble stories about who we are, where we come from, and how we treat each other.