Greetings:
I finished the MFA program at Buffalo just as Trebor began teaching there. I entered the program as a filmmaker and participated in a couple of on-line discussion lists for experimental animators and filmmakers. Last year, while browsing a really dumpy used furniture and appliance store in Buffalo, I discovered a course pack, completely out of place amongst piles of trashy vinyl, entitled "Architecture of the Uncanny," apparently for a course taught by someone named Antony Vidler in 1996. In this thing is reprinted on-line essays and interviews by Critical Art Ensemble and this Lovink guy, as well a bunch of other people. I am fascinated by what I have been missing as a result of my relatively weak links to the internet. (I still use university and library facilities.) There is an essay about independent television in Holland that I find fascinating, having been exposed to the history of public broadcasting, George Stoney and the like, by Tony Conrad in Buffalo. I studied and
teach (part-time) Anglo-American philosophy, have now no access to filmmaking equipment, and am strongly tempted to join the community television station in Dallas (to which I have just moved). My progress as an artist impatient with technology, at home with theoretical books, and growing less patient with art "for art's sake," has made it rather difficult to continue with filmmaking, not to mention the costs. The idea of collaboration has attracted me for some time (there's a book called "The Third Hand" on 1970s collaborations, Steve Kurtz gave a talk in Buffalo with Faith Wilding several years ago). Taking a cue from a link in a course Trebor's teaching, I've been reading and taking heart from Edward Said's "Representations of the Intellectual," where he advocates a kind of amateurism in scholarship. . . .
Bernie Roddy