It became apparent early on that it would be difficult, maybe not even possible, to find enough artists in this age group who were both sufficiently wired and prepared to participate. I had to broaden the field by lowering the age limit to late forties, early fifties, and by being more inclusive, that is, by including arists other than visual artists. Once I did this. I found considerable initial interest: there were in all about 60 participants registered for the project.
After a year had passed, I saw that it would be unlikely that 'Sea-Changes' would ever reach its second phase. Despite the 60 artists who expressed initial interest, a much smaller number actually made contributions. Some of these contributions were extremely interesting and well written, and I felt that it would be a shame if they didn't have a public presentation. 'Sea-Changes' was set up so that in the first phase, when people were making contributions to the central database, there was no facility for publishing these contributions on the web. The public phase was to come later, when the participants began to create their "fictional" biographies.
With the consent of the contributors, I made public their original, personal biographical images and entries. This is now what you see when you read a biography on 'Sea-changes'--not the intended fictional biography but the actual biographical submissions made by the contributors. I've posted only contributions that could more or less stand on their own. One of the contributors, who has since died, wrote some wonderful things but they were from a work in progress: I made public as much of his work as I was able to. On the other hand, another of the contributors has created a significant, coherent set of biographical essays: I couldn't just let these lie in the magnetic obscurity of some hard-drive.
In retrospect, I see that the project had one too many twists: it required a long-term commitment and involved a two-stage process, each part of which was in itself demanding, and it needed people who felt confident in their ability to write. But perhaps most importantly, it asked the participants to put off any immediate gratification: their contributions were not supposed to be public during the first phase of the project, when they were submitting to the database. According to the original plan, it was only later, when they were creating their fictional biographies from the database, that they'd see their work on the web.
With many thanks to those who took an interest in 'Sea-Changes',
Myron Turner
January 1999