When I brought Illumination Gallery online four years ago my aim was to explore the animated text form, which I had developed over the course of many years. My artistic inspiration was William Blake. I wanted to apply digital technology to Blake's vision of melding text and image through printing. Like Marshall McLuhan, Blake understood that the medium was the message. Unlike McLuhan, Blake transcended meditating on the nature of the message. Rather, he plunged headlong into losing himself in the process defining the message. His illuminated texts were attempts at achieving an aesthetic equivalent of medieval illuminated manuscripts. It was all about the evolution - or de-evolution - of communications media. In medieval times the Catholic Church controlled communications media by controlling the educational system. The Bible was the Word and the Church determined who could read and write. Church scribes handcrafted illuminated manuscripts, devoting their lives to preserving and extending the essence of the Bible. Although Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press during the Renaissance, only at the height of the Age of Reason and the dawn of the Industrial Revolution did its impact fully take hold socially/culturally. Without the printing press the great political upheavals that forever changed Europe and America would never have occurred. For writers the printing press proved an incredible boon, opening a wide market and sparking the birth of the novel. However, for visual artists it was a mixed blessing, leading to a strict demarcation between so-called serious art and commercial art, with the former going in museums and the latter mass-produced for the commercial marketplace. Perhaps what I most love about William Blake is that he never acknowledged any such distinction. In Blake's hands the printing press became an artistic tool. I diverge from Blake in that my art hinges around Mac computers. Blake delicately, painstakingly fine-tuned machinery with his fingers. I intuitively struggle to harness computer software like Adobe Photoshop. Beyond Stylization, the animated text for which these words serve as introduction, addresses that struggle. The web, with its current limitations, is my chosen medium. While online companies like Amazon, eBay, and Google reap outrageous profits, the web remains in a gestational state. This has to do with technical constraints. My web animations require a great deal of bandwidth, so I ask the viewer's indulgence in putting up with the fact that they run through once slower than intended, before kicking in at their proper rate after looping, and they are best viewed using Firefox as your browser. I am a techno-miniaturist. My animations are designed to be experienced in a screen within a screen within a screen within a screen (i.e., in a screen on a web page within a browser on a computer monitor). The core image in Beyond Stylization was sampled from a cell phone photograph actress Victoria Masina took of herself in a mirror and posted on MySpace. I became aware of Victoria Masina through her MySpace page, which reveals a fascinating, beautiful woman, whose looks convey a scary elegance. I infuse her image into a meditation on graphics software. I believe the future of the web reduces itself to establishing a genuinely fluid graphical overlay of the underlying flow of content. Whereas for Marshall McLuhan content and style were one, for William Blake style erupted out of content in an artistic vision. The problem was that Blake was stuck dealing with the reality of the printing press. He did a wonderful job generating the illusion that his illuminated texts were handmade, but obviously they were products of a mechanical entity. Computers are similarly inhibitive.