Sea Changes

Brief Introduction

Sea-Changes is a collaborative biography project for artists in their 50's and up. Artist here is broadly defined to include visual artists, video, sound, and performance artists, composers, media and computer-based artists, etc. The collaborating artists contribute autobiographical materials (consisting mostly of texts and images) to a common database. When enough material has been collected in the database, each artist will begin to construct an autobiography or "metabiography" from these materials, using anything in the database, excluding his or her own contributions.

The point of Sea Changes is to find our own lives in the lives of others, regardless of gender or individual boundaries. The artists are free to develop their own approaches to creating their biographies, inventing, adding, and subtracting images, texts and documents, wherever they see fit.

One of the intriguing implications of the project is that there will be inevitable overlappings: various artists will be using varying amounts of the same materials from the database. Each individual metabiography, then, will be one aspect of the larger metabiography of all the participating artists, which is what Sea-Changes finally will be.

A more complete discussion of the backgrounds, concepts, and methods involved in Sea-Changes will be found in the Call for Participants.

Public Interface

There are two interfaces for Sea-Changes. In addition to the standard interface, which brought you to this page, there is a 3-D interface, made using VRML 2. In order to view the 3-D interface you need a 3-D plugin for your browser; the one which we used when developing Sea-Changes is Cosomo Player which can be downloaded from the Silicon Grapics Web site. This is available for PC's and Unix.   Intervista Software, Inc. has just recently released WorldView 2.0, a Virtual Reality modeling Language 2.0 browser for Power Macs. And by December, Mac users should have the SGI Cosmo Player available to them.

1. Imagery

     The main image is based upon Kepler's Model of the universe, published in 1597. Although he followed the Copernican view that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the uiverse, like his contemporaries he envisioned the planets as being embedded in crystal spheres. These spheres in rubbing against each other were thought to create a heavenly harmony, and Kepler constructed an elaborate maethametical theory for this harmony. Our model shows the spheres of jupiter, saturn, mars and the sun. The geometric shapes represent Kepler's means of showing distances between the planets.

     The reasons for using Kepler have to do with the nature of Sea-Changes. I tend to think of the images and texts contributed to the database as a 'universe' of experience. When the artists construct their fictional biographies, they gives us insights into aspects of their common universe.

     In both interfaces the four winds appear, as they often did on early maps and cosmological charts, representing the four corners of the earth and the motion or mutablity of human experience. They seemed to be an apt reinforcement of the idea that in Sea-Changes each artist gives her or his life back to a universe of common experience and in creating a new biography mutates into a new form of self.

     Finally, I thought of going back in time for my model of the universe for several reasons. Kepler's cosmos is both different from ours and entrancingly beautiful. Viewing it, we become aware that ours, too, is a model, also beautiful, and that one of the central impulses of human beings is to create out of our experience models, forms, art, whether these are models of the planets or even of our own lives, the shapes and meanings of which are under continual revision. Finally, it seemed important to me to create a bridge over time, as we do in the on-going process of creating and re-creating our personal stories.

2. User Interfaces

     To find your way into this universe, to read one of its aspects, you simply click on any point on the spheres. One of the fictional biographies will be brought up in the browser. If you click on one of the four winds they will bring you to one of the menu items listed at the bottom of this page. One of these menu items is a listing of all of the biographies, should you wish to come back to a particular one.