When I applied to the Goddard MFA-IA program, I wrote at length in my application about my desire to explore the possibilities of the digital world through digital video and webdesign projects while firmly situating myself in a broader artistic community.  It was a thinly-veiled lie.  I basically applied because I’ll need an MFA before I can become a professor of fine arts at an institution of higher learning, and Goddard seemed the easiest, quickest, and most innovative way to achieve that goal.

 I’m glad that my goals have changed.

 Yes, I’ll admit that I still aspire to that eventual MFA, but the first three semesters of study at Goddard have been an intensely intro- and retrospective experience that have forever changed who Paul Evan Hughes is.  Does that sound like pro-Goddard propaganda for the admissions viewbook?  Maybe.  Is it true?  Absolutely.
 
 Looking at the work I’ve done so far in this program, I can make four distinctions: video, webdesign, writing, and Samuel Delany.  I came into this program with a desire to make videos, and only make videos.  That desire soon became secondary to the realization that almost every aspect of my artistic practice is involved in an intersecting web of concerns, fears, talents and hopes that determine who I am both as an artist and as a human being.  It is impossible to polarize and fragment the media in which I work, because my projects tend to bleed over between media.  I’ve discovered that there is interconnectedness to artistic projects that I have undertaken that I once would have considered stand-alone projects.

 Allow me to attempt to elucidate.  I came to Goddard with exactly one video project under my belt, a network of perhaps five webpages tied loosely to a message board service of which I am an administrator, seven published books, and having read one Samuel Delany novel.  My interactions with Ruth Wallen, Catherine Lord, and now Pam Hall have helped me to distill some sense of who I am as an artist, the community within which I operate, and once-hidden overlying themes in my work.  I am now well-aware that my fascinations with digital video, building pages on the internet, writing journals and speculative fiction novels, and obsessively reading Chip Delany’s work are not disparate elements of interest, but integral forces that have determined who I am and will be as an artist.

 In this Goddard journey, I’ve learned to recognize and explore underlying themes that span my entire body of work.  As an artist, I am drawn to the traditionally-negative or uncomfortable aspects of human existence.  My work often digs into the painful emotions that are often hidden behind the surface.  One major theme of my art is loss, the experience of loss, the aftermath of loss, and learning to deal physically and emotionally with loss.  I’ve used events from my life extensively in this exploration of loss, most poignantly the suicide of my best friend, the events of September 11th, 2001, and the exit from my life of the woman whom I had intended to marry.  Art has become therapy; I find great solace in working through the trauma and emotional damage that these events have caused in my writing, my video art, my pages.

 Another major theme of my work so far has been the exploration of the boundaries between worlds, whether that is the public/private conflict or the physical/virtual conflict.  As the owner of resurrender.net, I am intimately involved with an online community of several thousand members from around the world, a fragment of which is the Goddard MFA-IA message board at illout.com.  I am especially interested in studying transgressions of worlds.  What happens when the virtual world of the internet and the physically-sensual world of “real life” collide?  Since founding resurrender.net in 1996, I’ve been the target of several stalkers, and have felt my “real life” threatened by virtual forces that had stepped over the boundary into the real world.  The physical/virtual transgression has become a major theme not only in my online work, but in my speculative fiction and video art as well.

 I’ve spoken of resurrender.net several times above, but I’ve not really explained what it is or how it relates to my artistic practice.  At the moment, resurrender.net is a collection of fifteen webpages created so that authors, visual and musical artists can have a place online to share their work with other artists and engage in meaningful dialogue about their work and themselves.  After I became co-administrator of illout.com in 2001, I realized that the message board service would be a great opportunity to offer other artists a safe space to interact.  Since then, the network has grown exponentially.  I’ve worked with over five hundred authors on the various pages of resurrender.net and have overseen the publication of two anthologies of work by these authors in addition to my personal publication.  Working with such a diverse and global community of artists has been an intensely rewarding and provocative experience, as evidenced by my practicum project.

 For my practicum, I oversaw a convention of resurrender.net authors in New Orleans.  To document the event, I had many of the authors use my video camera to take footage of the interactions between the once-strangers as they finally met people whom they’d known online for years offline, face-to-face.  This was a limit experience: the transgression of virtual and physical worlds.  I am now analyzing how the interactions between those who met offline have changed, if at all, now that that temporarily-physical community has once again become a solely-virtual community.  The resurrender NOLA03 convention was the impetus for a string of offline events for people in the community.  Planning is already taking place for resurrender NOLA04 and several smaller get-togethers for later this year.  My practicum was and continues to be a validation of what I’ve begun at resurrender.net.  Virtual communities can successfully navigate the transformation into physical communities.  The thrust of my creative endeavors and research so far has been exploring that line between public and private, virtual and physical, and the practicum gave me a real-time example of a major transgression as it happened.

 As stated above, I came to Goddard with exactly one video project completed, a senior independent project that was self-involved and indulgent.  In the course of my study thus far, I’ve created five major video projects dealing with everything from 9-11 to kittens to suicide to teddy bears.  My video practice has finally begun to take shape as a valid expression of my art.  I’ve not only begun to master the technical aspects of digital video, editing, and output, but I’ve become aware of the themes that drive my art: loss, surrender, public/private, virtual/physical, sacred/profane.  My work is now succinct and powerful, having the ability to stir intense emotions in my audience (as evidenced by the number of tears at residency video series) while reflecting those concerns and themes that define me as a person and an artist.  I’ve not yet mastered video art, but I’m learning who I am as a video artist, where my work and I as an artist stand within the context of the greater artistic community.  My learning and exploration has not just been the act of creating, but the act of watching and listening as well.  Since I’ve come to Goddard, I’ve attempted to watch as many videos as I realistically can, immersing myself in video art of the past and contemporary video so that I can firmly situate myself within this already-established community.  I’ve been highly inspired and influenced by the video work of artists like Chris Marker, whose “La Jetee” has been almost directly responsible with my fascination with the juxtaposition of stills and motion, and Linda Montano, whose “Mitchell’s Death” was a thematic inspiration for my own video exploration of my best friend’s suicide in “The Stillness.”  Although advisors have recommended artists to view, I’ve found it difficult actually acquiring the videos they’ve suggested.  ILL has been almost useless in terms of getting videos; universities don’t want to lend their media.  I don’t have the monetary means to rent art videos from organizations like facets.org, much less purchase them.  I have been able to find some video art for sale on amazon.com and ebay, but most of the time, the titles are unavailable.  I am lucky that I live above the Spark Gallery, where there is a monthly video series that features short independent films from around the world and more traditional SU undergrad fare.  I’ve also begun research and action on getting my own projects into festivals through registration on various webpages, like zoetrope.com, ifilm.com, and filmfestivals.com.  I’ve begun researching grants and programs that would give me the monetary assistance to make submission to these festivals a feasible financial possibility for me.  I know my resource list lacks a solid foundation of video resources and books about the fundamentals of video art, so any assistances advisors can give to steer me toward appropriate resources would be much appreciated as I enter my fourth semester.  I don’t have a fully-developed video practice.  I have some inkling of what I can do and what I’d like to do.  I guess I’m asking for help in contextualizing my video art within the greater field of video art.  Artists, works, books: it’s difficult to know what to look at when I never studied video in undergrad.  My video practice comes from a solid foundation in two-dimension still visual art, new media, and music composition, none of which carry with them the video art history that I know I need to be aware of for my practice to become fully-realized.  Since this semester has been stifled by a broken camera and little video art of substance, in my G4 semester I’d like to continue the theme of playful exploration that I had set as a goal for this semester.  I know that my practice has been entirely too rigid and planned for previous projects, always with an end product in mind.  I’d like to experiment much more in the video medium while gaining a better understanding of the fundamentals of video art, through exposure to artists and works that gave birth to the medium and left their own distinct marks on it.

 I’ve begun obsessively reading and attempting to situate myself in a literary community.  I should address the fact that the lines between my writing and my other media are fuzzy at best.  Goddard has taught me that my creative practice is instinctually interdisciplinary.  That is, I seldom if ever paint myself into a video- or writing- or design-corner.  My work is essentially multimedia in nature.  Something that I find interesting in a video will inevitably slip into a passage of my next novel.  A line from my journal will become a voiceover for my next video.  Both the journal and the video will appear online in a hypermediated document for my online community to view and discuss and perhaps contribute to in discussion on the message board.  There’s no way to separate any of my media from the other, because the basic themes and expressions melt from one to the other.  I’m uncomfortable even casually calling myself a “video artist” or an “author.”  It’s not as simple as fragmenting the artist Paul Evan Hughes like that.

 One aspect of my personal research that I’ve not yet discussed is my research of the work of Samuel R. Delany.  Once a casual reader of his science fiction, I’ve now decided that I want to become a premiere Delany scholar during my time at Goddard.  As evidenced by my attached resource list, the majority of my reading so far has been Delany’s speculative and transgressive fiction, and his essays of cultural commentary, literary analysis, and queer/African American theory.  I am mesmerized by Delany’s work, the sheer beauty and genius of his words.  One element of his work that directly relates to my own is his synthesis of real-life events into his fiction, and fiction into his real life.  I deal daily with the decision-making process of how much of myself to reveal in my writing.  Through a careful analysis of Delany’s fiction compared to his non-fiction accounts of his personal life during the times in which he wrote specific books, I’m now able to draw correlations between the events in his fiction and those of his real life.  I intend to continue my Delany research in an attempt to “learn all things Delany” and fully-explore this most-influential of all authors to my own writing style.  That isn’t to say that I don’t want to read other speculative fiction authors’ work.  I’d like to read more Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, and Jack Womack, and any other appropriate authors that my advisors can suggest.  I’m drawn to Delany, Russ, and Butler in particular because of the seamless way they present worlds where traditional boundaries of sexuality and humanity are blurred.

 In my fourth semester, I know that I must do serious work towards expressing the context within which my practice fits contemporary art in society.  I’ll need help developing a resource list and acquiring the resources that will give me a better understanding of the fundamentals of contemporary art in my attempt to situate myself.  It’s difficult coming into this program and choosing to do mainly new media when I’d never done it before, and there’s no simple textbook delineated by chapters in which I could point my finger and realize that that was where I belonged as an artist and that is where my art sits in contemporary artistic circles.  My work has been driven by interior motivations; now it’s time for me to discard that and realize that I exist within a greater community that’s been effecting and affecting my art even without my knowledge.  I need to be pointed in the right direction, and I’m just now realizing this and surrendering to that realization.  I’m no island.

 At the risk that I’ve been babbling on incomprehensibly, I’m going to choose to stop now.  In my time at Goddard so far, I’ve seen both my art and myself mature.  I’ve been able to begin to recognize underlying themes in my art and recognize how those themes relate to the contemporary art world.  I’ve begun mastering my own artistic practice, both through technical sophistication and an intense introspection that reveals who I am as an artist, where I intend to go, and how I relate to the greater artistic community.  I’ve attempted to make art that is unique and innovative and distinctly mine, while at the same time recognizing my influences and those whom I myself influence.  As Hesse wrote in his preface to Demian, “I’ve ceased to question stars and books.  I’ve begun listening to what my blood whispers to me.”  I’m learning and will continue to learn about who I am and what I create and what I embody as an artist.

I am becoming.
 

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