I want to tinker with the engine of culture, not write the manual.

I recognize that digital media depart from traditional art media in their formal properties, and my work suggests that digital media also occupy a different social space than traditional media, providing digital media artists new opportunities beyond technique. My art work, and career in teaching, museum informatics, and curating (see CV) support my conviction that digital artists can be cultural agents who participate broadly in the extended social life of media art. For instance, I was the first artist to sell a work of digital art on eBay, suggesting that digital media art might have a relationship with the new economy as well as with art history. In my previous work, "Experience Base" I facilitated a collectively generated technical XML schema (a similar strategy to that included in the current proposal) for describing human life and emotion. I then submitted that technical standard to ISO and ANSI - two organizations that monitor technical standards for industry, museums, and libraries. In this way I humorously commented on the construction of formal languages for creating the historical record, and what is worth remembering.