I grew up on a housing estate in South Ockendon, between Upminster and Grays. Went to Catholic schools, worried about mods and rockers, and then skinheads, shy and innocent, not a clue about much at all. Around 14 I got interested in birdwatching, then painting and drawing. Before that I liked to make models (Airfix) and create my own board games, including war games, that including defining rules and writing instructions. My dad got me interested in nature, reading and religion/philosophy. All these things turned out to be formative and pivotal. My first heroes were mostly artists and writers (Constable, Turner, Cezanne, Degas, Marc, Kandinsky, Braque, Sartre, Orwell, Lawrence, Joyce, Genet..

I did pretty well in school until I was about 16 and then I started to lose interest , .. or capacity! It was the 60’s and I was waking up to a more poetic, romantic and political world, reading and listening to folk singers/songwriters. All very much at odds with my surroundings.

At 18 I left school and enrolled into the Art Foundation course at Thurrock Tech. It was liberating, in all kinds of ways including finding my own “tribe”. The next year I left home and wandered around for a few years, a bit of a hippy, in search of some meaningful spiritual connection. Reading books like The Glass Bead Game, The Masks of God, the Dancing Wu Li Masters, and the Tao of Physics I got interested in number systems, mythologies, and symbols, began thinking about belief systems, cultural behaviors, different ways of looking and seeing, most especially in the underlying grammars and conceptual frameworks that underlie our cultural, more specific, narratives and story lines. 

Next I fell into Art College in Sheffield (1974) and after sometime bouncing around I began to design and construct “minimalist” sculptures and conceptual drawings, following my  interest in number systems and ordering principles. I  became fascinated with conceptual and psychological features of simple structures, like the vertical and horizontal separations of walls and floors, above and below ground, and room corners, which brought me to considerations of surface, division, and the concept of zero, as well as the relationship between “pure” abstract mathematical structures, such as the platonic solids, and the always specific and infinitely variable physical realizations of form and structure in the natural world. I was fascinated by the way a simple number system could start at 1 and keep going on, or could be hinged around 0, and that in mathematics (and later in computation, that things could repeat, whereas in nature nothing repeats.  The questions whether numbers are discovered or invented (we sure didn’t invent PI!)

At home I would still paint and draw, more loosely and expressively than my student work. That more intuitive and expressive work always seemed more “true”, undermining any effort to be tamed by ordering principles or methodologies. I mostly kept that work to myself: in my insecurity, I think I felt that my more system-based, conceptual interests would be seen as more acceptable and “legitimate”, although in fact, no one was very interested. I had no money and couldn’t afford materials but still managed to make some low cost sculptures and proof-of-concept drawings that were never realized as objects.

When I graduated I found myself with a lot of work too large to keep. I destroyed everything except for my drawings. That got me started thinking about the material resources and space requirements of art, which turned me off the idea of making art for a long time.

So now it’s 1977 and I’ve just graduated. I still have no clue about work or money or generally how to take care of myself or what I want to do. I started working as a proof reader in Sheffield but then met and married an American, Cheri, and moved to the US. The US was very good for me. For a start there was no safety net and I quickly learned that I had to work to survive. My first jobs were as a cashier in all night supermarket, and an assistant in an agricultural store. At the same time I was hired to manage a small community art center, the Oswego Art Guild (Oswego lies on the shores of Lake Ontario, north of Syracuse in upstate New York), where I discovered I had some decent organizational skills and even some handyman abilities! Cheri worked with me and later took over when I moved on. I loved that time, made new friends, arranged classes, even taught some photography, and continued to paint.

Personal Computers first hit the market in the late 70’s but things really started around 1981, with 1982 being the breakout year. I wanted to buy the Commodore VIC-20 but held out until the Commodore 64 appeared, with an incredible 64k of RAM! Can you imagine what you can do with 65,536 bytes! (Compare that to a current 16GB laptop which has 16,777,216k of RAM..). I bought a computer because I was afraid I had no future without some technical skills and, like many other disenfranchised young people, personal computers provided me with an opportunity to learn something by myself that might change my life and give me a “way in”. I started learning the BASIC language and, again like many other people, it was like coming home! What was, and is, great about coding is that you learn in small increments but each learning step opens many new doors, both conceptually and  in terms of capability and functionality. Learning to program gave me lots of positive feedback which was perfect for someone as inconfident as I was. I was also able to learn by myself in my own time and at my own pace, perfect for a social isolate like me. 

My then wife Cheri was and is, a wonderful) weaver and wanted to develop her own designs. So my first serious effort was to design a weaving program to simulate a four harness loom: she could sit at the computer and set up warp thread, arrange the threading of the harnesses, hook the harnesses to treadles, and decide the treadling sequence. And then woosh, (well as whoosh as a computer could get in 1982!), the computer would display the pattern, which she could save, or print out with the setup instructions. If you recall the C-64’s 4 color limit and the block colors, it would seem very clunky by current standards but at the time we were both pleased as punch when it worked! And just writing this I did a check online and found out that I can run my old code through an online C-64 emulator, so I’ll convert a faded old printout of that old BASIC code back to text and see if I can relive the experience!

I spent the rest of my professional life teaching computer science at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in Asheville, North Carolina, including a stint as their Director of Online Learning, and also taught workshops in programming, online learning, and online course design. By now it’s 2002 so it’s all about C++, Java, and Object Oriented Programming principles, and then Web-based, client/server applications.

As an instructor I was especially interested in the way that beginning students engaged and got excited when programming Web applications. Their feedback and evaluations were encouraging enough that I decided to write a textbook, now in its 5th edition, that took this approach to introduce fundamental programming concepts and procedures: A Web-Based Introduction to Programming, Essential Algorithms, Syntax and Control Structures using PHP, HTML, and MariaDB/MySQL.

I want to add that I believe programming offers a massive and liberating opportunity for many people, of all ages, including seniors, to become mentally active, creative and empowered. Just as music, writing, painting, cooking, gardening, etc, coding can be enjoyed as a hobby and for pleasure. It is a myth that programming is difficult, it can be fun and fulfilling, just give it a try.

During my time in Asheville I found my way back to painting, fell in love all over again with watercolors. The creeks, forests, and “hollers” of the Blue Ridge Mountains, around my home in Asheville, and the blackwater swamps and Outer Banks of eastern N.C. were a source of endless inspiration.

 Staying local is a manifestation of bottom-up thinking. In top-down engineering, if a system behaves unexpectedly we speak of errors and call it broken. In bottom-up systems we refer to unexpected behavior as evolutionary, or creative. Interestingly, in information science, the measure of the relative value of information reflects its degree of “surprise”; this formula turns to be the same as the formula used in engineering to measure the likelihood of error in a system. I think it’s worth thinking about that.

Apart from teaching and learning my personal interest in technology has focused on “bottom-up” modelling. My MS coursework introduced me to chaos theory, biological systems theory, bottom-up processing, cellular automata, L-Systems, fractals, fuzzy sets, etc. All that opened my eyes to a far more profound understanding of evolution, and appreciation of the value, for all of us, of a bottom-up rather than top-down orientation in the way we perceive, think and act, as individuals and communities.

Since retiring I’ve been revisiting some of that early work, playing with the Processing language,and Java to develop or recreate some simple examples of bottom-up processing and cellular automata.  I think this is still a fascinating subject that provides a wide open playground for anyone with this kind of interest, either for both fun or as a professional pursuit. Programming tends to focus on top-down engineering and goal oriented functionality; the whole point of evolutionary programming is that you cannot have an end in mind. If you have a goal then it just ain’t biological; you can just set initial conditions, define the rules, start the thing and on serve what happens. There’s literally a universe to explore just within a simple binary system.

My code page has a few examples.

I retired from full-time teaching in 2013 and moved to the UK with my then wife and good friend Constance. After a few years in Durham  followed by a brief return to the US, I have settled in Scotland, First in Dumfries and now living on the Isle of Bute. 

2020 was a year of significant change that began with a broken femur and a diagnosis of cancer (Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma).  The arrival of Covid meant six months of isolation in a single room while I underwent chemotherapy. I was found to be in remission in July 2021. I’m finding my way with my new more vulnerable body and self; as many others who suffer a serious illness report, I have found this to be a massive growth experience and in some ways I am grateful to have been “woken up” to a deeper sense of the value and wonder of being alive, and of the privilege of being, for such a short and precious time,  a part of this impossibly beautiful planet.