This site does not yet do what I would wish it to do — provide simple access to the work I’ve published over the years and a place where I can usefully share the ideas I’m now working on. I could take out my frustration on WordPress for continually changing the way it functions so that users have to keep learning, but that would be unfair. The extraordinary things that it enables us to do make it easy to forget that, in historical terms, internet technology is still in its infancy. It’s in the natural order of things that it will evolve rapidly, just as it is natural that people like me, who use it as outsiders, will always be running to keep up. It is actually extraordinary that I can (more or less) build and manage a website without any training or expertise at all, at a minimal annual cost that allows me to keep adverts from the site. So, frustrating as it can be, I’m very grateful to WordPress.
In truth, the real problem is a combination of my own inadequate skills and my uncertainty of how to organise more than 40 years’ of work in ways that make it accessible and useful to others. Like so much in art and life, it’s both a conceptual and practical problem. Working with a web-designer might be fun (if I had the resources) but it wouldn’t solve the essential problem, which is how to imagine a structure that makes it easy for readers to find what they are looking for. The result, for now, is a website that is confused and confusing – ‘ramshackle’ as I said recently in an email explanation. It might be that way for a while, and so I apologise to anyone who’s got lost, or been unable to read minute text or felt shouted at by BIG TYPE. It will get better, but it might take a while before normal service is resumed. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something you can’t find or just want to be in touch, please use the form below.
François Matarasso 