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Letter from the Editor
September.01.2006
When I was growing up in the woods of Oregon, we lived down a long gravel lane. Though you might think that made our home remote, at the time, a jaunt to Portland—the biggest city in those parts—took all of fifteen minutes.
Over the years the gravel lane has been replaced by concrete, most of the woods razed to make way for housing projects, and the location itself annexed to the suburb of Tigard.
And despite admirable projects such as Portland's light rail, the kind of regional accessibility I enjoyed in my youth has been roundly replaced by the clichéd bumper-to-bumper traffic found on most local and interstate thoroughfares.
Moving to Seattle—a city even more behind in transportation planning than most in the states—didn't help. Selecting the timing of any trip, even to the grocery store, is key, and no matter the care you take in planning, you'll likely find yourself unexpectedly stuck in a bottleneck created by a road revision project, an accident, or some other sort of traffic mischief.
But if our physical roads find themselves increasingly obstructed, the internet subways to and from the regional artworld increase daily on an exponential level, a development that somewhat compensates for the rigors of concrete travel by enabling all manner of new brands of communication, community, and connection.
It was with these factors in mind that we decided to present our monthly magazine in an online format, which enables us to work with our contributors remotely, distribute our issues regionally, nationally, and internationally without the hassle of paper mailings, and, in general, run with more financial efficiency than a printed publication can.
In addition, traditional printed publications now steadily find themselves online right alongside myriad 'new media' artworld resources. Newspapers, weekly rags, galleries, art marketplaces, community blogs, and even the journals of individual artists have all made (or are making) their way to the Web in droves.
In tribute to the fact that Visual Codec is published once a month and covers terrain too large and rich with artists for any one publication (online or otherwise) to canvas thoroughly, it is with great pleasure this month that we unveil the latest addition to the Visual Codec navigation bar: the newswire.
The Visual Codec newswire will complement our tri-city show listings, articles, and other once-monthly features by acting as a near-daily resource aimed at navigating the lush regional array of additional online visual arts resources, from newspapers, to magazines, to journals, to blogs, to artist diaries, and so forth and so on (and on and on).
In launching the newswire, we hope to come closer to our ideal of serving as an engaging window into (and catalyst for) the burgeoning visual arts scenes in Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, and everywhere in between.
Good reading,
m.
Founding Editor
Visual Codec
editor@visualcodec.com
