Long before one could post videos on the Internet, artists were utilizing the tools available within the Web itself to produce work. This type of work never had a fixed name but was sometimes called Internet Art or net.art. In this art form, the browser itself was often used and experimented with—which makes sense, as the browser is the window through which we see and experience the Web.

If you want to get a sense of television’s monolithic past, watch an episode of the 1950s American family show Leave it to Beaver. Gleaming white, pristine—it looks like it was carved out of marble—the show exemplified an ideal of a suburban middle-class family. Just about as opposite to The Real Housewives of New Jersey as you can get.

“Andy Kaufman: ‘I Trusted You’”: Andy Kaufman was my mom's friend when she was a little girl in Great Neck, Long Island, so I've always been aware of his work, and this is by far my favorite clip of him.

This first post is an introduction both to me and to some of the things I’d like to talk about while blogging for the Take. I’m a composer, but in a slightly looser sense of the word than you might expect. I write string quartets, but I also perform onstage as a live visualist and musician, make feature-length cinematic work, public art installations, interactive Web sites, and design performance works for ensembles of people with laptop computers.

I didn’t go to film school. Instead I went to liberal arts school and self-imposed a curriculum of creating tiny flawed video sketches, brief meditations on comic conundrums, and slapping them on the Internet. Messages in a bottle—maybe some like-minded individuals would respond and leave a comment that said, "You're just like Sarah Silverman," because that's mostly what people say to females peddling funny. Maybe potential employers would Google me and then deny me secretarial positions upon graduation.