Chris Ashley: WhoAmI? WhatIsThis?

Chris Ashley <chrisashley/at/yahoo\dot\com> is an artist, writer, and educator living in Oakland, California

A former elementary school teacher, and until December 2004 the Manager of New Program Development at the UC Berkeley Interactive University Project, a K-12/university technology and curriculum collaboration. Currently a Policy Analyst at UC Berkeley. Extensive experience integrating technology into classroom instruction and curriculum; planned, managed,

and delivered teacher professional development at school, district, and county levels;

coordinated collaborative projects between the university and K12 schools. Bay Area Writing Project Teacher Consultant and a 1996 National Educational Media Network Outstanding Teacher.

Since March 2000 has posted writing and HTML drawing to a weblog nearly daily, and since July 2002 has posted an HTML drawing everyday (except for the occasional trip with no tech), beginning with the fifteen day drawing series July Short Stories.

The HTML drawings exist within a specific context- anyone who has followed the work for awhile will have a sense that:

Written for the CD "Christopher Ashley: HTML Drawings," September 2004, ISBN (3-901102-22-1), edition S.p.N.LAUB

All of the approximately 782 drawings presented here date from 2002-04, and are made entirely with HyperText Markup Language (HTML)[1] to compose tables with columns and rows colored cells. They are not made using a graphics program, or other coding or markup such layers, style sheets, or scripting. I use Macromedia Dreamweaver to make the drawings, and they are made "by hand." These drawings represent probably 60-70% of the drawings that I have made over the last three years in this medium.

One drawing (and occasionally two) is made every day and posted on my weblog (link)[2] except on days when, for some reason, I may not have network access. This public, journal-like practice is an important aspect of how the work is made, and is a context that provides another layer of meaning to the body of work having to do with audience, habit, deadline, accumulation, aggregation, cross-referencing, and reflection. These drawings began in the context of a community of authors of weblogs who were reading and linking to each other regularly, which influenced my practice, habits, and need to explain what I'm doing and why.

The drawings typically occur in small series of, say, twelve to fifteen or more drawings. They are ususally based on a particular subject, approach, or problem: travel or place; a memory; an idea or concept; a feeling, inspiration, or aspiration; responses to other art and texts; as well as the usual painterly issues of line, color, plane, space, edge, and scale.

I call these images drawings because drawing seems to me to be a medium more open to varieties of approach and material, whereas paintings seem to me to be physical object and require paint! However, it's fine with me if other people look at and refer to them as painting. Clearly, as can be seen in some of the gallery views I've concocted (ex. 1, 2), I've imagined many of these as paintings, too. It doesn't matter that much; what does matter is that I draw everyday.

I started using HTML because I wanted to make images for the web, and the idea of an image made with code embedded in a web page struck me as elegant, novel, and efficient. The weblog as a writing environment encouraged me to avoid graphic images. I didn't want to have to use a graphics program, and save, upload, and organize jpegs and gifs. I s liked the idea that the browser would read the code on a web page which would contain all of the information the browser needed to display the drawing.

HTML is an extremely limiting medium for making images. Edges of shapes are always hard, colors are always solid, and there is no texture. Every image uses the grid, and verticals, horizontals, and right angles are the rule. While the grid is a given, I work hard to make images that don't make the viewer fixate on the grid, that don't lock the eye down. Regarding color, a broad range is possible using hexadecimal code[3], a web-safe palette of 216 colors can be relied on, and no transitions of blending or fading is possible.

At the same time that this medium is very limiting, these very limitations can be immensely freeing. It's clear what I can't do, and so I have to explore small twists and innovations to find new ways of working. I also recognize the need to push against the medium only modestly because of my wish to be considerate of the user's browser, bandwidth, and monitor. This is very much in-line with the painter Thomas Nozkowski's commitment to small formats and canvas boards as a form of anti-elitism, as a kind of political and social awareness and engagement. I would like to note that two series of 2003 drawings are represented here by graphic representations- screen shots- rather than with the original HTML source code; the drawings in the Hippie Dreams and Mojave series each are very dense, with tables inside of tables resulting in several hundred and even thousands of lines of code each. These graphic representations were meant to solve bandwidth issues; the only graphic alteration of these drawings is resizing.

I'm very pleased to have this opportunity to compile these drawings in one location, to organize them in different ways, and to have others write about and validate my art. I'll continue drawing.

September 2004

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[1] Web browsers read a markup language called HTML in order to properly display formatted text, images, and links on web pages. For example, <a href=http://chrisashley.net/weblog.>Weblog</a> = Weblog

[2] Chris Ashley's weblog: http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/

[3] Hexadecimal code is a system for designating color using six characters: #ffffff=white; #000000=black; #003399=darkblue, etc.

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New Year's Day, 2005, near Occidental, Sonoma County, California

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