Last edited: Friday, August 03, 2007
About Chris Jennings
I started doing web things back in 1996 when I started Islomania.com.
I was born in Oxford in 1949 and attended Wimbledon School of Art in 1967 and Hornsey College of Art between 1968 and 1971. I took and achieved a Diploma in Art and Design. My early career was as an artist and I exhibited widely, both in the UK and abroad. I have an old CV with exhibitions over here on my chrisjennings.net site. Not much of my material is available online, but I have put this 'Beach as Studio' project on a web page. I also ran a project to photograph all of the megalithic sites in the UK. Some of this material is available here, and I am gradually scanning in my black and white photographs. I wrote something about the megaliths here
I became involved in computer-generated art works in the mid 1980s and I subsequently worked in the field of computers for art education. I built a number of public sculptures and I posted something about this one on my blog a while ago.
My first substantial job was with RM (was Research Machines) and I created a software application called 'Art+Time', which was a great success. In those days computers were just moving into the school art room and I ran a number of projects with local school children to get them inspired to use the computers creatively. In fact my job at RM was as 'Creative Consultant'. What a great job title! I was one of the pioneers to adopt CD-ROM and multimedia technologies and built and managed a project with the British Museum on the 'Anglo-Saxons'. This was one of the first CD-ROM projects that used multimedia and was used in a museum display. The CD-ROM was also marketed as an education resource for use in UK schools. I went on to create a series of CD-ROMs for the BBC (jointly with HarperCollins) on Shakespeare plays. There is something about it here.
I have been a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University since 1995 and I am the course leader for the MA in Interactive Media Publishing. This was originally the MA Electronic Media, and was started in 1995. In those days we taught a lot of CD-ROM and multimedia authoring techniques. Now, we are almost entirely web based and more and more use server side technologies like PHP and MYSQL. You can check out the web site here.
If you really want to know more about my ancestors then do take a look at this page which links to some very early photos of me and my family.
If you are interested in my family life then by all means take a look at some family photos here, although you will need to register to enlarge the images.