Page 146 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 146/146
About the author
Bob Cotton is a writer/designer/researcher with a lifetime’s experience in new media, starting with Krystal Klear in Warp-Drive a graduate a/v show at Portsmouth College of Art in 1967, and a post- graduate year at Hornsey College of Arts Light/Sound Workshop (LSW) in 1968-69, where he spe- cialised in multi-screen movies (8mm Technicolor film-loops), exhibiting at Oxford MOMA in a show with LSW and Archigram. In 1969 he organised the multimedia components of the Isle of Wight Bob Dylan Festival, with Ray Foulk, Christopher Logue, Jeff Nuttall, Graham Stevens. He collaborated with writer Chris Robbins in the Canned London project - a boxed mixed-media set including works by Alan Aldridge, Chris Logue, James Wedge, etc (unpublished). He worked on the East Ham Gra- phics course at Newham College with Valerie Allam and Gary Crossley, setting-up the Computer Graphics Workshop with Richard Oliver and Asif Choudhary, and designing the Hypercard interac- tive magazine High Bandwidth Panning in 1987. In the late 1970s he worked with Peter (Bunny) Burnell on Project Hex - a multimedia ‘concept’ album with funding from Phonogram. In the 1980s he designed several Laserdisc educational programmes for BP, and collaborated with Peter Burnell and Malcolm Phillips of BP on the MERMIS (Marine Emergency-Response Management Information System) - a laserdisc catalogue of all the World’s nautical charts under interactive PC control for their Sullum Voe control centre.
In the 1990s he art-directed several commercial interactive CDROM programmes with FITVision, for clients as diverse as Halliwell’s Film Guide, Manchester United FC, and various magazines, as well as the Thorn/EMI Sight & Sound exhibition in 1994. He also worked with Richard Oliver and Mal- colm Garrett on the books Understanding Hypermedia (1993 and 1998) and The Cyberspace Lexi- con (1994), and wrote the You Aint Seen Nothing Yet pamphlet for London’s ICA (1998). As research fellow at London College of Communication (University of the Arts, London) he organised several conferences including Interact! a Sony Media-funded exhibition at LCC. He wrote Futurecasting Digital Media for Pearson/FT.com in 2002 (a survey of technology forecasting techniques and a me- thodology for design in a period of constant innovation), and with Peter Burnell, designed the pilot for the Crisis Command TV series for BBC2 and BBC4 - 2002-2004. ( involving emotionally intense simulated disasters with simulated realtime media coverage). He also led the UAL+ Press Associa- tion Knowledge Transfer Partnership - futureproofing the PA.
Later in the 2000s he was visiting lecturer at Arts University, Bournemouth in Digital Media Produc- tion and on the Film BA, teaching film theory and history. He made ZeitEYE - a short film about art and media innovations 1900-2010. He retired in 2015 to write and design mediainspiratorium an ‘in- termedia art history’ - as a website and an iPad app; the Julia Secession - a site about Julia Marga- ret Cameron’s photography and the historical cultural context in which she lived and worked. and in 2010 with film-maker and artist Paul Windridge he organised Visioneca a festival of experimental film at Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
https://juliamargaretcameronsecession.wordpress.com/ https://mediainspiratorium.com/
https://mediartinnovation.com/about/ https://vimeo.com/372445421 - ZeitEYE film 2010
email: bobcotton@mac.com