Daniel L. Potter
Web Designer, Scholar, and Editor in Santa Barbara, California
Daniel L. Potter
Web Designer, Scholar, and Editor in Santa Barbara, California
I am a creative technologist and essay film scholar -- both freelance -- currently living in Santa Barbara, California. I write and manage the main Chris Marker site, chrismarker.org.
I have worked in the past for Interval Research Corp., Mattel Media, Disney Imagineering, Intuitive Surgical, the Conference of Delegates of the California Bar Association, Santa Barbara City College, and FastSpring. My roles have included Market Research Assistant, Producer, Senior Producer, Creative Director, Database Engineer, Web Designer, UX Web Designer, and Technical Director. I am also currently editing a book for a UCSB professor on dance history for Oxford University Press. Our previous collaboration, Carmen: A Gypsy Geography, was published by Wesylan Univ. Press in 2013.
I was educated at Stanford University in Honors Humanities (Comparative Literature), and received my MA at Cornell University in Comparative Literature in 1990. I have received both Fulbright and DAAD fellowships to study in, respectively, Münster and West Berlin.
My heroes are Yeshe Tsogyal, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kafka, Borges, Dylan, Garcia, Jean Rouch, Robert Kramer, Harun Farocki, Patti Smith, Tom Waits, Paul Klee, Terry Riley, Hans Blumenberg, Alexander Kluge, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bob Marley, Pete Namlook, László Krasznahorkai, Henry Miller, Marker himself, and Marko Pogačnik, just to name (quite) a few.
I also read a lot of speculative/science fiction. My latest discoveries are Seb Doubinsky and Karin Tidbeck, along with Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arkady Martine, Jeff Vandermeer, Ian McDonald, and Christopher Paolini. Goodreads is a fine place to visit my reading history. Of late, I am greatly enjoying the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (The Buried Giant, The Unconsoled, Klara & the Sun).
I am also an espresso fiend, ambient otaku, book collector, and fan of all sorts of Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers, not least Llull, Bruno, Montaigne, and Pascal. My research focus is the art of memory and essay film. I am a devotee of the Criterion Channel & Ovid.tv.
Don't get me started on music. My tastes run from Charles Lloyd to the Dead, Tom Waits to Ustad Shujaat Khan, Saccharine Trust to Krishna Bhatt.
My favorite city is Berlin, where I lived the year before the wall came down and whose Berlinale film festival is my favorite vacation activity (well, the Davenport Roadhouse is awesome too, as is Elevation in Crested Butte).