Throughout 2005 and 2006 I studied various ideas in social networking and mobile telephony. Working together with visual artist & programmer John Tonkin, we created BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space, a work that appeared as part of the juried international exhibition of artworks at ISEA 2006, in San Jose California. The work was well reviewed by the New York Times, and engaged participants at ISEA silently, listening to their interactions via Bluetooth sensors scattered throughout downtown San Jose.

We have a website documenting the work, explaining our design goals & intent, and you can examine how we generated "emergent" models of participants real-world social networks, simply by listening to the Bluetooth devices (mostly mobile phones) they carried with them.

We expect to install a revised version of BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space as part of the Sydney Festival in January 2008.

In 2004 I began to write software for Java J2ME-equipped mobile phones. My first project, LiveRecord was an attempt to make a system which could record "moments of quality" - such as a song, or film, or TV show you might come across, and want to share - immediately - with your circle of friends.

I demonstrated the project at the Mobile Journeys laboratory at dLux Media Arts in Sydney, in February 2005. This led me, after a few months of careful thinking, to begin working on BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space.

A web site with complete source code and explanations of how LiveRecord works is available by clicking here.

From October 2003 through January 2006 I founded and ran the Emerging Media and Interactive Design programme at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, in Sydney. In November 2004 I received a 4-year appointment as Lecturer in Interactive Media. Beginning with the 2005 academic year, AFTRS began to accept MFA candidates for a concentration in Emerging Media and Interactive Design within their Digital Production programme.

Working with film and TV professionals at AFTRS has been a very illuminating experience - the industry is fundamentally different from the industry in the United States - both smaller and committed to a different type of filmmaking.

I arrived at AFTRS with a mandate to revise the School's curriculum to incorporate the latest practices in interactive media. At the most basic level, this has meant that the School is starting to focus on DVD as the end-product of student productions (rather than 35mm film), but, more broadly, interactive techniques are assuming a greater role in all aspects of film production, from previsualization to electronic press kits.

Since 1999 I have been working with digital video, both as an artistic medium and as a technology. That year I bought myself a Sony TVR-900 digital camcorder and began to shoot video with it, editing that footage on a Sony VAIO PC.

My skills as an editor have grown steadily, and in 2001 I felt comfortable enough to begin work on a larger project, a feature-length video, This Strange Eventful History, an evocative tour of Burning Man 2001. That project is still being edited into a finished film.

While editing film on my camcorder, I became aware that the camcorder was little more than a tape backup device with an attached imaging unit. When connected to the PC with a FireWire cable, the camera acts like a tape drive, entirely under the control of the computer.

I wondered if it might be possible to store any arbitrary data stream to a digital camcorder. In June 2001 I first mentioned this idea to Tony Parisi, who encouraged me to pursue my research. In October 2001 I had time and the technical capability to put my theories to the test. As it turns out, a digital camcorder is an effective data storage device - neither as fast or reliable as a hard disk, but much cheaper, and able to store up to 18.5 GB of data per tape.

Working with Brent Britton and Rupak Nag, I filed for a patent on this technique, using the implementation (which we named "FireUp!") developed from October 2001 to February of 2002 as the basis for the application.

In the time since the patent was filed, I have been refining the implementation of the software, and we have been actively looking for firms which might benefit from a license of the technology. We expect to release a shareware version for the Windows platform by mid-2003.

I was first introduced to digital video in 1998, when I received a two-year appointment as Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television. The School is famous for the graduate film production program - where George Lucas, Ron Howard and Robert Zemeckis got their start.

I was asked to set up a curriculum in interactive media for the film production program. Graduates students in the program are required to take one semester's instruction in interactive media before graduation. Some choose to major in it.

Over the course of my two-year appointment, I set up the curriculum requirements for the concentration in interactive media (part of the MFA degree in the film and television production program), defined and taught courses in interactive media, and designed the new interactive media lab.

Like the folks who started WIRED magazine, I regard Marshal McLuhan as something of a personal guru. I remember reading Understanding Media back in the early 1980s and being completely awestruck by the implications in McLuhan's arguments.

When, in the early 1990s, I began to work in virtual reality, I took the lessons I'd learned from McLuhan and applied them to my own work, developing a consistent and rich methodology to explain the how consciousness and the self are altered under the influence of "virtual" media - that is, computer simulation.

My first academic paper, "Final Amputation: Pathogenic Onotology in Cyberspace" was accepted by the Third International Conference on Cyberspace, held at UT Austin, in May 1993.

Two years later, I presented a follow-on work, "Proximal and Distal Unities," at the Fifth International Conference on Cyberspace, in Madrid.

In the years that have followed, these ideas have formed the core of my activities in interactive media, and were featured prominently - albeit subtly - in my book The Playful World.