WORD / TECH :: ERIC MEYER's BEAUTIFUL, SURPRISING CULTURE BATTLE FIELD NOTES SERIES
A funny thing happened on the way to Naropa. And on the way back from Naropa. And in the utopian internet space we chose to turn into a rhizomatic, collaborative community after this summer’s writing program ended. Online we gathered, growing and supporting each other’s work, even if we’d never met face to face. And so we got introduced to kindred spirits, and stay “local” despite our diasporic returns to homes worldwide.
This is how I “met” Eric Meyer. And as I came more and more in contact with Meyer and his work, pushing genre boundaries at the crossroads of code and literature, I knew I wanted to share his process work with this community. Here, Eric introduces himself, in preparation for an ongoing series of Field Notes. We’re excited to have him. Welcome to the family!
I’m an artist, designer, developer, writer, and musician. I make novels that become websites, websites that become performances, performances that become poetry, and poems that become novels again.
I don’t strive to be multi- or trans-media, I just work with what I have, experiment with everything, and throw away the garbage. The boundries of genre and medium are arbitrary. Anything is possible, but nothing is precious: what matters is communicating with people.
Queer, unexplainable, complex people. Blood and bones and frontal lobes. All of us alone together, dancing, drinking, vomiting on our friends, laughing, building bombs, and sleeping on our sides. I want art that reflects our crazy queerness, art I could never dream of on my own — as fucked-up and beautiful and surprising as the world around me.
So I work with other people, because they are other. I don’t collaborate: I steal, bastardize, provoke, and argue. The goal isn’t agreement, but co-creation and parallel play. Sometimes many of us together in a room, other times alone, fighting with culture and history and place.
We start with an idea, and expand out to find or create all the necessary content: a stack of notes, images, movements, and texts to use as our script. Everything else is a question of performance.
In web design, that script is HTML ready to be styled in unique ways for every browser, device, and use-case. As an artist, the script and performance can be more fluid. A novel can become a book, but sometimes it becomes a website, or loses all it’s words to become a piece of music. Not because it must be a Multimedia Novel, but because it must be performed by any means necessary.
Since leaving college to run a theatre company in 2006, I’ve been an Artistic Director (New World Arts), Technical Director 
(The LIDA Project), and Tour Manager (Countdown to Zero). I’ve co-founded a web company (OddBird), a band (Teacup Gorilla), and a Vicious Trap (whatever that is).
You can find more of my work at eric.andmeyer.com.
