13.04.77, Lincoln, U.K.
It took me a long time to own the word "Artist" but we're here now, so I guess this is the bit where I attempt to explain myself ...
In the dim-and-distant past I was a musician working with bands and producers, live and in the studio. This lead to me getting increasingly involved in production work and audio-engineering. Moving away from purely musical production, I spent a long time facilitating work in the field of sound-art, and as that engineering work became increasingly complicated I got into software development. For a while I designed, developed, and published a range of software for musicians and producers, whilst continuing to work in technical-facilitation, helping artists and organisations devise, deploy, and make work for a variety of large-scale surround-sound systems in museum-and-gallery settings. Along the way, I've been involved in back-end production and design in the worlds of recording, educational-publishing, and marketing, so have built a wide-base of transferable skills, broadly in the realm of media-production. Several years back, I made the transition into the domain of visual-art, and now produce a variety of works in the fields of video-dance and performance for camera, along with various experimental technology-related image-making.
Amongst other things, my creative practice investigates time, often using musical-perspectives to make images and video, and at-heart I'm an experimenter. Having spent time in various studio-settings has lead me to not being afraid of pushing buttons for the sake of simply learning what happens ... I'm proficient in a wide array of technology-related delivery and a confident user of Photoshop / InDesign / Premiere / AfterEffects / SynthEdit / vvvv / (a variety of boring officey-products for making documents and spreadsheets), and I write in c++ / .net / php / web-related / HLSL ... etc ... but beyond a list of other peoples' products, I'm not just a user of systems : I'm a creator of systems - tools which I then use in either facilitating others, or more directly in my own creative-practice. I take a keen interest in the why of how things work, and outside of the purely digital realm, I also make various things as part of arts-delivery. I've survived the last 20 years as an independent self-employed practitioner, so I don't have a particularly concise, careers-oriented C.V. but much more of a fluid portfolio, where I can find myself one week : shooting and editing video, the next : on-location tech'ing a festival, the following : in the dark-room, and the one after that : coding and patching in-advance of a live performance as a 'VJ'.
I'm a board-member and resident-artist with the organisation 'SlumGothic' working with disadvantaged communities in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to leverage arts and art-practice as social-glue, and regularly get involved in delivering events and festivals at 'x-church'. Whilst I don't (yet) have any formal qualifications, I'm increasingly involved in the academic-world having lead modules and workshop-activities in a variety of settings with participants ranging from very small beginners to post-graduate researchers, and have also worked with various groups of differently-abled adult-participants in performance.
Over the last five years, internationally, my video-works have been seen at (on average) a new venue about every 3 weeks as part of festivals, curations and screenings, and in the time I was actively programming, my tools reached a direct-audience in-excess of 300,000 through online and magazine placements, and countless others through code I've contributed to a range of 3rd-party software developers.
© 2021 Daz Disley