“hi i'm david”
The generic card.

ARTIST, DESIGNER, WRITER & EDUCATOR: that pretty much sums up where, what and who I would like to be known as. The question is how can I justify it?

I studied Time Based Media in BA hons Fine Art, over 10 years ago, (time for a reunion), specialising in liveart and installation. I continue to practice as a fine artist although the majority of my work is imagined and never physically realised outside of this context. This in itself could be descibed as a medium for creative expression, personal identity interpreted through other peoples perceptions.

I have worked as a photographers agent representing fine art photographers to international commercial and public sectors. I was the creative director of one of the pioneering web design agencies in the Midlands, but unlike our contempories, Central Cyber Creative & Code did not float on the stock exchange, it sank without a trace. The design work and the agency now only exist in people's memories, sometime romantisied yet often forgotten.

As a freelancer, I operated under an "umbella" system, providing in-house design work for small PR and design agencies, on some leading business-to-business online communications. This corporate whore period conveniently financed my personal projects while the skills I developed enabled me to move across to designing interactive and interpretive media for galleries and museums. For extra cash I taught other corporate whores how to design ugly web pages, which enabled me to demystify the alchemy surrounding web design, jargon busting with hands on practical experience for artists and creatives in the public sector.

My career, (working life), until this point shifted rapidly at regular annual intervals, until I realised that the museum work had developed primerally into community and public art commisions, (with a heavy voluntary contribution), and the majority of the artists I was teaching were begining to pick up my freelace work.

I was moving on.

David Osbaldestin lectures in the Department of Visual Communication, BIAD, UCE in Birmingham and IVE in Hong Kong. Specialising in graphic authorship, digital folk art and viral media, he is currently researching viral disemination of new art and freelances as an artist, designer, writer and educator.