runran
[ born Randall Paul Adams ]
I was born in Edmonton, a Canadian city of moderate size, located at 53° 34' N / 113° 31' W: parkland mostly, laying between plains and tundra. My maternal great-great grandfather was an Orkneyman, William Lennie, a blacksmith at Fort Edmonton. In 1869 he married Annabella Fraser, a Métis daughter of Colin Fraser, bagpiper for HBC governor George Simpson. William and Annabella had a son named Colin Lennie who married Clara Grant, daughter of a notorious fur trader named Johnnie Grant and his Métis wife Lily.
My grandmother Pearl was born, daughter of Colin and Clara, a mere 15 years after the ‘rebellion’ at Batoche. She married a man much older than her, an English railroad foreman named Fred Smith. It wasn’t long before Pearl Smith refused to talk about her Métis heritage. By the time I was born it was a deep family secret - though when Pearl put her hair down she looked decidedly native. Serendipitiously, my partner JoAnn is 1/2 Cree and my stepson is 3/4 First Nations (Slavey/Cree).
JoAnn and I are not married, we live together like the fur traders and mixed-blood women of so long ago - “a la facon du pays” (according to the custom of the country). But I am so far removed from my Métis heritage that I can scarcely claim any connection. Nor can I claim to be Persian just because my father’s anscestors came from a small village named Sangar, in what is now northern Iraq. They were Nestorian Christians who emigrated to the prairie settlement of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in the early 1900’s. An account of their emigration can be found in a book by Isaac Adams, Persia by a Persian.
What I am is a media artist with a background in writing and visual arts, protoypically Canadian and curiously proud of my mixed bood.
My photography and mixed media work has been exhibited and collected by public galleries, museums and archives. Over the past 25 years, I have been awarded several grants for both writing and photography. Author of the non-fiction book Eternal Prairie, I have also had poetry, essays and photography published in Canadian magazines. From 2002 through 2006 I served as Associate Editor for the trAce Online Writing Centre, based at the Nottingham Trent University in England, commissioning and editing reviews of digital writing and new media. My trAce studio is a six-year adventure in publishing work online. The online journal was continued at notablog until 2007 (see links below).
During the past decade I have extended my media practice into the digital arts, fashioning hypermedia and animations for the web and live performance. I am co-curator of Interactive Futures, a new media festival and conference in Victoria, BC. I have taught creative website design and hosted writing workshops.
I live and work on Vancouver Island. The net is another country. There are several portals into my work [ writings, imagery, animation, spoken word, hypertext, hypermedia ]:
runran [ notes preceding my death ]
[ blog - current ]
http://www.runran.net/site
R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX
[ collaborative remix blog - current ]
http://www.runran.net/remix_runran
remix visual
[ digital images - current ]
http://www.runran.net/remix_visual
notablog
[ archive of links to digital artists, social and media commentary, project announcements 2005 - 2007 ]
http://www.runran.net/blog/blog.html
Curriculum Vitae
[ 1983 -2008 ]
http://www.runran.net/cv_runran.html
trAce Online Studio
[ 1999 - 2005 ]
http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/studio/radams/
You can contact me at runran -at- island -dot- net.
(Be careful with your subject line because I delete anything that looks like spam.)