Biography

introduction (you’re never going to read all this!)

my shadow with a flowerI've been using this personal website as my digital home (here's an old postcard of my real home town) since around 1998; adding to it, leaving work in progress lying around, and rearranging like the rooms in a house. If you read this (and can be bothered) contact me saying what you like or dislike. Feedback might just (and often does) encourage me to update things.

I'm probably a creative generalist (and I'd say an art of any kind is the medium for a creator), mixing special interests and long-term lines of inquiry with artworks, university (paid) and private (err… unpaid) research and freelance work, a process that recursively spawns new directions and ideas.

This site is arranged in three main sections (containing more than first appears) plus this biog, each with it's own coloured links throughout the site. I like the tradition of easter eggs, so some links might not be obvious. Other sections exist only as web peninsulars with maybe a single link from some page or other (like this one), and not much of a way back (you can find the back button :-)

what I do is lightweight glue

These are the people who inhabit the intersections of the Venn diagrams. They believe in ANDs rather than ORs. They're a member of more than one subset, more than one tribe. The reason these people are important is, just like merchants who go between real tribes, they carry ideas from one intellectual tribe to another. I call these people "glue people", because they not only join themselves to a tribe, they join tribes together.

- Larry Wall, Perl, the first postmodern computer language

I produce art, music and text (mostly short stories) in an order that varies constantly. I'm a self-taught dabbler in certain areas of mathematics, a doodling programmer, and an information addict with a huge interest span and an almost pathological aversion to specialisation. I've stopped worrying about appearing naïve in any one sphere - focussing on one discipline is admirable but I just can't do it; I'd miss the multi-threaded connections. Other artists working with technology have highlighted this issue of disciplinary homelessness for 30 years or more; the venerable Leonardo magazine is testament to their tenacity.

From 1998-2002 I was a visiting researcher at CCRS with many other artists, and exhibited a heartbeat-driven interactive artwork in 1999. I've delivered seminars on emerging interfaces and their implications for artists/audiences and accessibility, and for some years had a special interest in art-technology and disability, being one of the people turning DisabilityArtsOnline into an independent site under Arts Council England funding and reporting on emerging technology and disability, delivering seminars to various special interest groups. I research techology and culture, and teach under- and post-grad web technologies part-time.

what I'm interested in and am/have been doing now/last 10 years

visual and digital art
music and literature
  • A 2017 Memory Wire album "Dervish House" with Jim Tetlow and Chris Conway, and three tracks on a previous live album "Parallel"
  • Collecting and curating short instrumental acoustic guitar pieces, some of which were (ab)used in a rather pleasing manner in granular synthesis style on this track
  • Working out what to do with a big back catalogue of songs
  • Maintaining a body of short stories and flash fiction for live readings and publication
  • Working on two finished (as well as they’ll ever be) and one unfinished short novel
  • (Now abandoned after illness and bereavement) preparing to record that difficult third album for the band I used to sing and write with, who finished after over 23 years of performance in July 2018
research (papers, essays)

There (used to be, but tme moves on and no-one ever cares about archiving) a 2011 video of me describing what I do at the IOCT, De Montfort University (UK), where I was a research fellow. I’ll have to find my copy and put it up.

My academic research profile and publications are on Academia.edu

research (projects)
  • Working out how to archive the various projects at the IESD that began March 2013, investigating the use of software for social engagement in energy management and awareness (and building things like this public display, which won the Green ICT category in the EAUC Green Gown Awards)
  • (Shelved: original collaborator too busy) a project that aims to track individual movement accurately within sizeable human groups in a defined space at a finer resolution than offered by current GPS. This is an issue in Social Science, and aims to contribute in some small way to the Research Councils UK grand challenge What distinguishes the identities of individuals and groups, and what makes them cohere?
  • Preparing to start a webapp that aims to help with decision-making
  • Examining two ways to reduce the complexity of magic square sets and how they relate, and writing software to help in the process.
education, other
  • After years of re-working how to teach technology skills to successive generations who grew up with mobiles and social media, but may have missed the historical context and craft of programming, specifically front-end web development, creating and managing a module with my wife at a midlands university for this, the moudule is now run by a trusted colleague
  • Maintaining a spin-off company to maintain the energy-tracking web app we built for the NUS with EU funding

You can download my artists' statement and Condensed visual portfolio (PDF)
Older freelance work is under the now-redundant Eco Consulting website (download resume) where most of my work was web-based or in book design.

Social links

I rarely use an old Tumblr microblog (it pulls in posts from Tumblr), as if you're interested, with all the billions of acres of bloggery out there, competing for eyeball time. Or scan my Facebook page or (mainly for professional use) Twitter account.

Technical background

View through the kitchen windowThis site is big, but not clever. Hand-coded in 'emergent' spidery style (no site plan here :-) in mostly valid HTML & CSS (plus archeological early HTML). Like a lot of busy people I neglect my own website. But (as an early wiki user) I think in-text links are essential.

My first grey box was a 1980's green-screen Amstrad PCW 8256 running CP/M. Logo (and BASIC) got me into 'graphic programming' with the turtle and Logo. The venerable HyperCard's HyperTalk on the Mac took me much further; I joined the HyperCard mailing list for a while; it had some distinguished yet friendly thinkers and programmers. Hypercard inspired a generation of programmers and was a brilliant rapid application development tool at the time.

The best modern Hypercard successor is RunRev's open-sourced LiveCode (which I supported on Kickstarter). It enables you to create apps in a friendly visual environment. Also, here's a list of graphic programming tools I use for students.

Apart from a dumbly persistent passion for programming, I'm best as a technology-watcher, information architect, design and web technology educator, and translator between programmers, clients and end users. In the past I left heavy-duty code to Greg Turner, who got a Computer Science M.Sc. 1st for his Java work on cubeLife and to the late Ben Daglish, my much-missed Perl-monk (and Golang advocate) partner on various projects under Eco Consulting. Frustrated that experts and specialists take the complexity of their knowledge for granted, I try to write helpful beginner's guides and promote the agile philosophy in general.

How I made/make a living

Before I gave up being an employee to start a business and go freelance, I used 80's Apple Macs in my graphics and DTP profession. My Dad (a lecturer in typography) bought home one of the first Macs in the UK. Macs also have a documented history in the origins of digital art. Of course, OS X is now BSD Unix-based, which opened up more potential and made the Mac a programmer-friendly tool, yet also complicated the original "for the rest of us" ethic.

As Eco Consulting (established 1992) I have advised arts, educational, ethical and voluntary organisations on web technologies, and like to promote Open Source and Free software. We also do website hosting on two Linux servers (London: Debian, Dallas: Ubuntu) which (usually) pay for themselves.

Since 1998 I have also researched, published and taught part-time in creative computing and web technologies; first at Loughborough University HCI dept. and now at De Montfort University in Leicester.

I do standards-based HTML(5)/CSS(3) with JavaScript and once co-developed in Angular but abandoned it for the well-managed Javascript framework Ember, and am also an advocate for Responsive Web Design and Progressive Web Apps. I used to use Apache's SSI (from which I once made CSS variables but variable are now native in CSS). I know enough Apache, NGINX, SQL, Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP etc. to survive and work with other developers. I have had a Django dabble (abandoned at the painful deployment stage), and once supported _why's tiny Ruby framework Camping (Camping GitHub repo). I like Ruby as a language (try Ruby was the first of its kind) and currently use Denis Defreyne's excellent static site generator Nanoc.

profile for Dave Everitt at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers


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