Peter Schmideg profile picture

Peter Schmideg

Hello from the ass end of digital technology!

About Me

I am a web artist, influenced by William Blake. The web has offered me the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong ambition of combining visual art and writing in a single grid, as Blake did with his illuminated texts. My website, Illumination Gallery , is a product of this ambition. As much as I love Blake, I also have firm artistic roots in pop culture. To get a sense of who I am, click here .

Myspace Layouts - Myspace Editor

My Interests

Poetry, digital art, visionary use of computers, scream queens, horror film imagery, surrealism, kitschy eroticism, lite porn, dark beer, the history of Lower Manhattan where I live, the overthrow of fascist governments.

I'd like to meet:



I would like meet online and in the flesh folks interested in stretching the boundaries of the web as an artistic medium.

Music:

J. S. Bach, Iggy Pop, Bernard Herrmann, Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Laurie Spiegel, Gyorgy Ligeti, David Allan Coe, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Johnny Cash, Nikolai Andreevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, Hector Berlioz, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Terry Riley, John Fahey, Gustav Mahler, ambient sound/noise.

Movies:

Luis Buñuel's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie & Belle de Jour, Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, Walt Disney's Fantasia & Dumbo, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, Joel M. Reed's Blood Sucking Freaks, Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet, Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr & Day of Wrath, Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel & Blonde Venus, Fritz Lang's Metropolis & M, Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls, Chuck Jones's One Froggy Evening & Duck Amuck, Tex Avery's Who Killed Who? & Red Hot Riding Hood, Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg's Performance, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita & Fellini Satyricon, Ken Russell's The Devils & The Lair of the White Worm, Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo & The Birds, Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat & Detour, Nagisa Oshima's In the Real of the Senses, David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Chris Marker's Le Jetée.

Television:

I'm partial to early/mid 60s stuff like The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits.

Books:

Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Blake's illuminated texts, e.e. cummings' poetry (because it was so beautifully designed for the printed page), Jorge Luis Borges' wonderfully terse short fiction, haiku poetry from Basho to Shiki to the present day.

Heroes:

Truly visionary artists like William Blake , Hieronymus Bosch ,and, most of all, Matthias Grünewald .

My Blog

Hearts That Bleed

What I hope to never let go in exploring the web as a medium is the inherent mystery surrounding online personas felt/experienced every time I meet someone in cyberspace. A startlingly beautiful woman...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Sun, 11 May 2008 06:01:00 PST

The Elusiveness of Consciousness

Web animation allows me not only to combine image and text, but also to animate text. The ability to do the latter has been a revelation to me as a writer. I truly approach text differently than when ...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Thu, 01 May 2008 11:10:00 PST

In the Spirit of Annie Oakley

Annie Oakley was America's first female superstar. Appearing in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show she spawned her own legend.Funny how if someone were to present a similar public persona today, America wo...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:31:00 PST

Rolling the Dice of Design

Mortal engines churn, organically honed mechanisms, keying into the ebb and flow of external stimuli. Social/cultural inculcation deeply ingrained. But what if the center does not hold? Reality implod...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:05:00 PST

Virtual Reality Redux

Antonin Artaud coined the term virtual reality in an essay called The Alchemical Theater:All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual ...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:23:00 PST

Liquid Haiku

The more I explore melding text and image via computer software, the more intrigued I am by haiku poetry. Illumination Gallery has a section called Liquid Haiku.I have chosen to present my latest liqu...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:17:00 PST

Auguries of Truth

For me the human mind/soul is defined by a visual dynamic. Dreams offer a glimpse into what makes us tick spiritually.Yet ultimately it comes down to the visual flow of language. Music makes it all be...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Mon, 25 Feb 2008 06:31:00 PST

Surreal Texture

Why do I enjoy MySpace? Because it embodies what the web is about: information melding with stimuli - indeed, information morphing into stimuli.The root image for the animation running above was sampl...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:39:00 PST

Iconic Reprise

Recently Aristoxen, one of my MySpace friends, posted a blog with images he uploaded from a corrupted PDF file sent him by composer Kento Masuda. These images called forth the fascinating relationship...
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:15:00 PST

Hillary Rodham Clinton

In an earlier animation I played around with Barack Obama's public persona.I figured it's only right to also play around with Hillary Rodham Clinton's public persona....
Posted by Peter Schmideg on Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:06:00 PST