I've had the current website since about June 2000. From 1996 to 2000 I had a similar website called "MediaCubed" which was the precursor to my current website.

I originally founded the Digital Arts Institute as a digital art school, studio and gallery in Pasadena, California where classes and workshops on digital media authoring were offered. We also had digital art shows in our gallery, and we toured to other galleries and cafes. In 1998 I had co-produced with Scott Svatos a touring digital movie festival called "Film is Dead" (http://www.digitalartsinstitute.com/galleries/film_is_dead/), so that also got rolled into the Digital Arts Institute. That physical entity of the institute was closed down when I moved to the Netherlands, so now the website is a purely virtual space. It is essentially an online gallery, portfolio, and publication, as well as a repository and archival document of the artist's oeuvre.

I see the website as a part of a larger community of artists, critics and theoreticians working specifically with digital media mostly in online spaces. While the community is widely disbursed and highly decentralized (reflecting the nature of the entire internet), there are many hubs such as Rhizome (http://rhizome.org/) and Stroom (http://www.stroom.nl/). However, many digital artists (myself included) persist in displaying their work in physical spaces such as art galleries and public spaces such as cafes or sidewalk art shows.

I view myself probably first foremost as an artist, although it doesn't entirely describe everything I do. While I create what I would call "digital art", I also write (critically and creatively), do photography (artistic and commercial), and do commercial graphic design and user interface design. I have also curated some shows and taught courses on digital art and design. So "artist" is only one of the hats I wear. In an essay I wrote in the year 2000 (http://www.digitalartsinstitute.com/merging/) I talked about how old distinctions and categories were being broken down by new media, such as the merging of artists and programmers. I think this phenomenon is continuing to happen on a very large scale.

From a purely intellectual standpoint, first and foremost would be Lev Manovich (http://www.manovich.net/). I had the pleasure of taking courses with Lev when I was a graduate student at UCLA, and so he was an early influence on me and I've continued to follow his work.

Rhizome (http://www.rhizome.org/), which I mentioned before, often has some good work and discussions going on. I find the quality of the artwork they display to be a bit uneven, and their selection criteria are so ambiguous that it makes it difficult to fathom why they select certain works and not others. However, it's a good place to gauge what's going on in the larger community.

In terms of day-to-day inspiration, it's always coming from different places. That's one of the wonderful things about the internet is that it's a constantly morphing blob. I do a lot of scavenger hunts using the Google Images search (http://images.google.com/). I also search Yahoo News Photos quite a lot, and since my work is often political in nature I get a lot of inspiration from the news media.

There are a lot of great offline (physical) digital art shows in Europe. One of my favorites is Electrohype (http://www.electrohype.org/), which is held every two years in Malmo, Sweden. Typically about 60% of the work displayed is from Scandinavian artists, which is great because the Scandinavians seem to have especially embraced the merging of artist and programmer (or engineer) and they are creating absolutely fantastic work. Stroom (http://www.stroom.nl/) in The Hague and V2 (http://www.v2.nl/) in Rotterdam are also great places for finding out about digital art shows.

I use mostly word of mouth, and occasionally business cards. If I'm participating in an art show or speaking at a conference there's usually a big spike in traffic afterwards, so those kinds of off-line events have an impact. Another important source of traffic are the articles and essays I have on the site, many of which have been assigned reading in university courses in North America and the UK.

While I agree generally with intellectual copyright, I also believe very firmly in the right of artists and creative people to collect and sample the debris that litters the internet and our society. I realize that legally a news photo published by the New York Times is their intellectual property and you're not supposed to "steal" it. However, it's also a piece of debris from our media-saturated society, and I think artists should have the freedom to reuse it, recycle it, and reinterpret it. My basic guideline with such things is that I will alter the debris in certain ways, either visually or audibly depending upon the medium, as well as conceptually reframing it. I think this transformation makes it into something that the original author of that piece of debris never intended or envisioned, and thus it has been transformed into your own work. Marcel Duchamp really pioneered this with his Ready-Mades. When he stuck a bicycle wheel on top of a stool, the debris ceased to be either of the original things. It's really the same thing with media debris found on the web.

Incidentally, David Bowie recently invited mix artists to freely sample his music, what he calls "Mash-Ups". This is really forward thinking of him, and I think most traditional artists are having a hard time embracing this notion. And corporations are absolutely terrified of it.

Yes it does somewhat. Some of my work is intended to be simply looked at, and so in that sense I do engage in some "visual art". However, digital photo-collages are quite different because in the production/creation process there is a lot of layering of images. These original files can be reconstructed, reformed, and the layers can be peeled away. They are still entirely dynamic, unlike a painting or a traditional collage made with glue. The works I post on the web can also be sampled and repurposed by other artists, so that the life of the artwork is in no way static.

Much of my work is interactive and requires the spectator to "do" something to make the art "do" something. Interactive art takes Umberto Eco's theories of the role of the reader (or spectator) to an entirely new level, and it also allows a whole new range of possibilities for the artist. Artists in the twentieth century have experimented before with spectator interactivity, as with Yoko Ono's 1964 performance where she asked audience members to cut off pieces of her clothing. However, with digital art on the internet it can be done with just one person, or with thousands of people simultaneously all over the world and with the artwork taking on millions of possible (re)formations. I've sometimes called these "Fire-and-Forget Performances" because the artist can just post the artwork and never again be directly involved in the performance between the work and the spectators.

Joseph Cornell's characterizations are quite elegant. I have sometimes characterized my work as "imaginary architecture" because, like architecture, it involves the elements of time, interaction, and perception of an imaginary space. There is a tendency with a new medium to attempt to interpret it with the vocabulary of old media. Cornell tries to break out of this, but I suspect we will eventually see an entirely new vocabulary emerge to describe what we are doing.

I agree, the idea "forgotten lives" of things is interesting and holds a lot of meaning in the American throwaway culture. I also think in terms of recycling. I often look at objects and ask, "how can this be made useful in some entirely different way?" There is a place in Duisburg, Germany called "Landschaftspark" which is an old steel refinery converted into a recreation park. In the park there is an enormous water tank that is now used for scuba diving, and an old coal bunker that is now used for rock climbing. This is the sort of recycling and repurposing I see myself doing with digital garbage. There are often images and objects in my work that have nothing to do with the new meaning of the work.

Other times I think of the debris and garbage in a specifically self-reflexive and meta-cognitive light. Images of candy bars and an advertisement for a Hummer can be turned into satire of over consumption. Advertising, icons, and cultural memes are fantastic sources for satire and parody because they already say so much about themselves.

The United States also produces a large percentage of the digital garbage on the internet, so a lot of the debris I collect tends to come from American websites. As the world's "super-duber power" America is also a big target for cultural and political satire. I sometimes wonder if the legacy America will leave for future archaeologists will be mostly garbage.

This doesn't hold any particular meaning for me. But I believe firmly in the co-construction of meaning between the artist and the spectator. This co-constructive relationship is not perfectly balanced, for unless the artist is extremely explicit the spectator bears much of the burden for bestowing or interpreting meaning. Often when I have an idea or begin planning for a particular artwork it's a very intellectual process, but while I'm creating it's purely intuitive. There may be meanings that emerge in the work either from my subconscious or just by accident, and the work may communicate (or not) to different people in different ways. So if people see a metaphysical or mystical charge bestowed upon the recycled debris in my work then that's cool, but those aren't meanings that I see or intend to communicate.