About - Who am I

I work with other people from time to time, but Edge Effect is basically me, Andy Preston.

I've been interested in television and electronic music since I was a very small child and can trace the beginnings of applying electronics back to the 1980s when I first started using 8-bit microcomputers and analogue synthesizers and occasionally poking my nose into my parents work with our local community television station.

As digital technology has opened up new areas for me, I have rapidly moved into them - now expanding the tools of my trade into computer hardware and software, video cameras and editing software, digital and film stills cameras, image processing, and digital synthesizers.

My own art projects are now mostly based around live performances of my own brand of dark-ambient electronic music coupled with pre-prepared projected video. I've taken part in performance events in London, Bristol, Burton on Trent & Swindon and contributed to gallery exhibitions in Swindon and Bath.

I also provide a range of services to the business and arts sectors:

• Custom computer software
• Web development
• Consultancy
• Training
• Video and Audio production

Over the years I have developed software for a very large number of application areas:

• Process Control
• Scientific, mathematical & statistical visualisation
• Accountancy & business administration
• Point of sale
• Hardware interfacing & diagnostics
• Systems administration
• Multi-media presentation
• Audiovisual processing
• Web applications

Having one foot in the world of technology & the other in the arts, I am uniquely positioned to bring a sense of aesthetics to commercial undertakings and an understanding of technical issues to art projects.

In my artistic and technical work, I always search for simplicity. I avoid employing grandiose and leading-edge methods just for the sake of it and always strive for minimalism - finding technological solutions that simply get the job done with a minimum of fuss - producing artwork with a simple beauty (I hope). Occam's Razor and Te are the principals that guide my methodologies.

Apart from a diploma course in computer studies, I am pretty much self-taught in almost everything I do - applying the hacker mentality to my "relationship" with the devices I use.

I find myself rather disappointed by a great deal of the digital art that I encounter. To me, it tends to concentrate far too much on the idea of championing the medium without enough concern for any message, content or feeling. It's always been an aim of mine to produce work that reverses this trend. To create, perhaps, a digital-romanticism.