Bios

The Mapless Map · An Interpretive Bio Sketch

“The vested interest of acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom have always been bypassed and engulfed by new media.”
· Marshall McLuhan

This is a personal autobiographical exploration created between 1998 and 2000.

These are the results of documenting my process of transformation.

The document is a 44 page graphic book written, designed, digitally formatted, and printed in my studio on letter size— and later on 13" x 19" photo quality ink jet printer paper as a bound book.

In November of 1996 I began a period of recovery from 25 years of late stage chronic alcoholism.
My first attempt to stop drinking was in 1984. Following 13 years of painful recidivism, I had stopped.

There are many references to HIV in this piece.
At the time of writing I believed what I was told about HIV.
At that time I believed that HIV really was a virus and that HIV existed as a functional entity.
Those were my beliefs until 2004.

Based on my personal experiences having taken many different regimen of HIV medications for four years (1994-98), having stopped taking all medications of any sort in June of 1998, and after much research, I now believe that HIV does not exist as a functional entitiy. It is a social and financial theoretical construct. It is not a living thing. It has never been isolated in a laboratory and it does not reproduce or replicate and it is not contageous.

The new media of which McLuhan speaks in the quote above, for me at that time embraced most everything. The word "Media" used as a noun was being functionally transformed into a verb. Having just come from the world of wandering about the planet with the priority of maintaining a high blood alcohol content, to committing facts, dates and ideas to a concrete printable format, was indeed a shift of many dimensions. Those realms which had embodied my "vested interest [in personally] acquired knowledge and conventional wisdom" were indeed being "bypassed and engulfed by new media."

In 1998, pleasantly enjoying a very different life in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, I had just purchased my first ever personal computer— the hottest Macintosh G3 on the market. Accompanying it was an Epson 1520 wide format ink jet printer with the capability of printing 16.5" widths x many feet in length and the latest Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, page layout software which has rivaled and in many cases replaced the quintessential Quark in the printing and publishing industires today. (2006)

The media of my brain, my social context, my domestic context, and now that of a sophisticated means of concrete as well as abstract expression— the digital world had come me to my fingertips.

I was indeed engulfed.