I'm Noah Saterstrom, and this is the Avatar--
Your Avatar And You.
Remember this film?
And I am a visual artist and run the online art journal,
Trickhouse, and have a website called--
look at my website and I'm sure looks
like Noah's Work-a-Day page, where I post a new painting
or drawing every day or so.
And here is Brent Cunningham.
He is a-- It's very brief introduction.
And there a full bios are obviously in the program.
Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher, and visual artist
living in Oakland, California.
He is a co-founder of Hooke Press,
and operations director for Small Press Distribution.
Ander Monson is the author of a number of paraphernalia
including a website, a decoder wheel, five
books, and several chapbooks.
He teaches at the U of A, and edits the journal, DIAGRAM
and New Michigan Press.
And Dan Waver-- Waber, right?
Yeah, Dan Waber is a visual poet and partner
in Paper Kite Press.
His work appears in digital form, print, stage, classroom,
mailboxes, and puppet theaters.
So I actually hadn't thought that much about avatars,
or the word avatar, the idea of avatar much before.
This panel thought about the internet a lot,
but just as a kind of way in--
and then, we're just going to be pretty informal discussion.
I got the [INAUDIBLE].
They'll introduce each other, and I've got some questions
obviously, and we'll just completely open it up
for conversation to make it as-- hopefully as useful
and illuminating a discussion as possible.
Keep it pretty loose and informal.
But just to ground myself in the conversation,
I looked up avatar.
And of course, it's Sanskrit.
And of course, it--
familiar with avatar is used in Hinduism,
talking about celestial bodies being transformed
into terrestrial bodies.
Krishna and these things, avatars, all the
avatars that would be on Earth.
They coming across is that the analogy
has to do with coming across, celestial to terrestrial.
And I guess, in some ways, we're talking about physical bodies
coming across into digital bodies, and all of what
might happen there in the meantime.
Also woven into this is some of what Ander
was talking about in his talk.
As the original artifact, the form
goes from scroll to codex to digital, which is basically
scrolling again, but also, with web, net kind of related stuff.
The content itself changes or has the ability to change.
And so, what you make in response to those things,
how the internet publishing is different
from traditional publishing, all these sorts of things.
Lots of questions there, but maybe we'll start with Brent,
and introduce your relationship to the topic at hand.