I am an artist, and always have been. Its sometimes hard for people to understand why I consider programming an art. My background is conventional; I studied painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, but my nature was always very technical (sculpture, I was apt to say, is the study of materials and their expressive properties). You can see some of my paintings and drawings from this period in the retrospective gallery on my Images page. An important idea early on for me was the concept that inspiration led media, and an artist should learn to use whatever media best expressed the subject.
My work became arcane and process oriented, influenced by Art Brut, and Pre-Columbian imagery. I came to feel traditional media were elitist, and the culture of modern art moribund. During the mid ’90s I mostly wrote poetry; two of those poems, Bugs and A Good Wife, Who Can Find? morphed into spoken word pieces during my school days in audio engineering. You can find clips of them on the Audio page.
I travelled a great deal until 1998, then settled down for several years in the small city of Hilo, Hawaii. While working a variety of odd jobs to support myself, my creative outlet was learning and performing various kinds of traditional dance, including Hawaiian Hula, Tahitian and Maori, West African, Afro-Caribean, Brazilian Samba, Flamenco, and Middle Eastern dances. For three years I was a steersman for an outrigger canoe club, and ran the Honolulu Marathon. At home, I indulged in an extravagant array of crafts; baking, sewing, knitting, stained glass, lampwork glass, woodworking, musical instrument building. From 1995 on, there were jobs as a professional gardener on various projects ranging from arboretums to potager installations.
I decided to go back to school and moved to the island of Oahu to earn the money to do it. In Honolulu I worked as the assistant to a sommelier in a five star restaurant; I had some wine knowledge before that, but professionally tasting brought me to a whole new level. You can find occasional wine reviews on my blog, generally of cheap and easy bottles. Next, I landed a bus license, and drove a motorcoach for a tour and transport company. On Oahu, I took piano lessons, played the trumpet with the Oahu Civic Orchestra, joined a West African drum club, and played with a marimba band for a short while. My sister gave me a computer, my images went digital, and Dreamweaver and Flash were my toys.
In 2007, my education grew through the audio technology program at SAE in Los Angeles. My intention was to go back to school and get a better education as a theater tech; for several years I had worked at theater in Hilo as a lighting tech and projectionist, and audio would boost my skill set. While in school though, I was sucked into my computer like never before. Following graduation, I built my first webpage in a text editor and started learning code; messing around in web dev and programming languages. Now there’s an eclectic assortment of projects going on, involving both web development and applications. As usual, I don’t really know what I’m doing; but it sure is interesting.
Fun fact: Ele Munjeli has never owned a television or a car. I spend so much time in front of a computer, its hard to imagine sitting in front of another screen for entertainment, and as a projectionist, I gained a taste for film. While at times I’ve considered buying a car, and for six years I worked as a professional driver, I am now happily car-free, and bicycle advocacy is an important part of my politics. The environment is suffering, and a car-free lifestyle is the best solution to global warming.
