Danyl Strype is a young Bohemian coming from Christchurch, New Zealand.

With a trade union organiser father and a mother from the wild west coast of Te Wai Pounamu (NZ's southern island) his philosophy in art, life, politics and economics has always been an uneasy consensus of community solidarity and rugged individualism.

Danyl was brought up in a musical family and as a child had lessons in recorder and piano accordian and sung in choirs. As a teen he took an interest in the 'alternative' theories of music, lifestyle and society that accompanied the grunge era, with its strong roots in the DIY punk ethos and began to teach himself electric bass, drumkit and hand drumming. He is still learning but plays in a loose free jazz group (CBD Reality Testing Unit) and a heavy guitar band tentatively named La Terra Ghast.

Danyl have always enjoyed reading and writing, with a strong leaning towards fantasy fiction, especially its science fiction offshoot, most recently cyberpunk. He is currently in the process of typing up years worth of handwritten story fragments with the intention of building them into finished short stories and possibly a novel or two. He writes: "I get my best ideas from a combination of wild hitch-hiking trips and reading over older scenes and have been teaching myself to write first drafts like notes so I don't get bogged down in fine details and lose my inspiration."

Danyl enjoys critical writing and reflecting on the society and the world he lives in. He has boxes full of rants on conformity, the infotainment industry, anarchism and other topics written in his teens before he realized there was any public forum for such material.

He has had articles and letters published in anarchist and punk zines, community newspapers (including one called SMOG that he was involved in setting up and running) and student magazines. Since he discovered the internet in 1998 Danyl has been writing regularly for the web, mostly for email discussion groups (including his own DIYWeb group hosted by Yahoo) and more recently for Indymedia. Danyl was intimately involved in the establishment of the Aotearoa (NZ) affiliate of Indymedia and continues to organise and report for them.

He says: "Art and culture have been an arena of class struggle since the emergence of capitalism. There is a constant tension between the business model of artist as worker and art as product and the more libertarian concept of the artist as a heroic pioneer leading social change from the front.

"To complicate matters the 21st century artist lives and works against a backdrop of radical social change, where the old, polite, ponderous political debate between the left (state management) and the right (business management) is being disrupted and outflanked by a multitude of new theory and practice motivated by a desire for individual autonomy, co-operative economics and community-level control of resource management and social decision-making.

"The postmodern artist is both a product of this fermenting brew of revolutionary praxis and a contributor to it through the messages (or lack thereof) communicated in their works."

Visit Danyl's home page at http://strypey.orcon.net.nz and visit the Aotearoa (NZ) affiliate of Indymedia at http://aotearoa.indymedia.org/.

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