Faculty/Staff Directory
Thomas Jennings
Tom Jennings continues working as an artist, activist, and computer historian. Tom's work has been exhibited in numerous and varying art spaces around the country and has also shown internationally at the 49th Venice Biennalle. Tom had a solo exhibition Story Teller, the inaugural show at Machine Project, Los Angeles in 2003 where he also gave his lecture Early Computing in 1994. He has guest lectured at UCSD and CalArts.
Tom is a repository of technical crafts, practical philosophy, and the physics of programming at the ACE (Arts Computation Engineering) program at UC Irvine, where a large part of his job is teaching and mentoring graduate students in technical arts. He received an MFA from this program in 2009.
Tom has specialized in computers, software, and electronics since 1977; computer networking since 1984; internet since 1992.
In 1992, with John Gilmore, Tom founded the Little Garden, one of the earliest internet service providers (ISPs), and in the same year he was hired as the first webmaster for Wired magazine. Tom was also the founder of Shred of Dignity, a skateboarders rights group, and publisher of the seminal queercore zine Homocore from 1988-91. Tom created the worldwide FidoNet bulletin board network (35,000 servers in 1995). He was inducted into the Shareware Industry Conference Hall of Fame, for Fido/FidoNet in 1997.
