How and why did you get involved with fAf?
I was an early subscriber to fAf. When I heard in 1992 that ISAST was planning to retire it in favour of their own LEA (Leonardo Electronic Almanac), I suggested to Roger Malina (Executive Editor, Leonardo) that I would be interested in taking it over. As a member of the art & technology community I feel that fAf is an important and unique source of news and information.

How long have you been with fAf?
I began editing fAf in 1992, first basing it at Mississippi State University (which still hosts our main server), then at Griffith University (1994-95), before moving it to Queensland University of Technology in 1996. When I received an Australia Council New Media Arts Fellowship at the end of 1999, I resigned as editor, but continued as Executive Editor.

How would you say that your role has evolved the years?
I made an early decision to continue fAf as primarily a news and information service. In the early days I did everything myself. Then at Mississippi State two of their Arts students - Celeste Brignac and Hudson Oliver helped out. When fAf went on the web, we began the web's first "Arts Resources" facility. This was moderated by Jane Patterson for many years. It was very popular and got more hits than the e-zine on some months. Christie’s Auction House in New York asked permission to use it as their in-house home page while they were setting up their own web facilities.

When I moved fAf to QUT, I arranged with Jeff Jones who was then head of their new Communication Design programme, which I had helped create, to have students working on fAf for credit towards their degree. This really helped get fAf into a regular and dependable schedule.

What memory of fAf stands out most in your memory?
The bit I liked the least was when I had to manually maintain the listserv. With over 2,500 subscribers, we used to get maybe 200 bounced mails a month. All of them had to be traced (via forwarding aliases, etc.) and counted. After three successive bounces a subscriber was unsubscribed. It was mind-numbing work.

What do you see as the challenge(s) for fAf in the future, serving the new media/art/technology community, and how can we meet these?
In the early days fAf pretty much had the field to itself. When we launched on the web in January 1994 we were one of the only two arts sites, and got a colossal number of hits. Now it's more competitive and fAf needs to work harder to retain its place.

Wherever I go, people speak well of fAf - it has an excellent reputation in the field. I think this is a direct consequence of its value as a news source. I'd like to see the Resources section grow, but think this requires money - a paid curator with a qualification in art history who can keep up with the huge amounts of information out there.

Biography
Paul Brown is an artist and writer who has been specialising in art and technology for 30 years. He began using the Internet in 1984 and from 1992 to 1999 he edited fineArt forum, one of the Internet's longest established art zines.

From 1984-88 he was the founding head of the UK's National Centre for Computer-Aided Art and Design. He returned to Australia in 1994 after a two-year appointment as Professor of Art and Technology at Mississippi State University to head Griffith University's Multimedia Unit. In 1996 he became the founding Adjunct Professor of Communication Design at Queensland University of Technology.

Brown chaired the Management Board of the Australian Network for Art Technology (1997-99) and he is a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards for Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and for “Digital Creativity”.

His computer-generated artwork has been exhibited internationally since 1967 and is on show in Europe, the USA and Australia. During 2000/2001 he was a New Media Arts Fellow of the Australia Council and in 2000 was artist-in-residence at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

His website is: http://www.paul-brown.com