Java

Flock Music

The question of what the group is is vexing. It is hard to conceive of its proper functioning. We seem to constantly be wondering if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing.

Image is Dialectics at a Standstill

Forty years seperate the events captured in these images, one from May 1968 Paris and the other from November 2011 New York. The pixels from each have been rearranged to approximate the image of the other.

From A to B

To say that under a regime of the digital, the photograph has become "dubious," as Peter Lunenfeld has, still does not account fully for the ontological change that photography has undergone. The gross manipulability of the photograph is actually that which is most clearly understood and commonly  remarked on.

Degradation Study

In this experiment I fed back images into the system which created them so that the subsequent image degraded in each instantiation.

This fade to black approximates the effects of massified circulation of images where it seems that over time the images which once shocked, after repeated exposure, seem hardly able to elicit any response at all.

The Reality Is Not Conveyed

In Precarious Life, Judith Butler writes, "The reality is not conveyed by what is represented within the image, but through the challenge to representation that reality delivers." As I set up my drawing machine to reproduce the images from Abu Ghraib, I had that problem in mind.

Black and White Atrocity

I continue to question the ethics of representing atrocity and the ironic dissipation of the moral force of images of atrocity within the society of the spectacle.

In \a\ Place of Small Crows

I was compelled to return to images from Abu Ghraib so long after the revelations of 2004 as much for what had happened as because of what had not happened in since.

This work is a book in two volumes containing the processed photos of the corpus originally released in 2004.

Every Pixel Screaming

This video is derived from the archive of torture videos that came out of Abu Ghraib. By writing software that sonifies the otherwise silent frames of video, the work attempts to question the silence which has left the victims of these atrocities without justice or redress.

The visual aspect derives from the rearangement of the pixels by a color ordering algorithm.

Mimesis/Synthesis

In these plotter drawings two systems of representation are contrasted: mimesis, wherein the form of the representation is derived through a process of imitation; and synthesis, wherein the form is derived by a process of virtual ontogenesis -- that is the form is made in a way analogous to the process of growth in the referent.

Contemporaneity

The stochastic photo algorithm I developed for use with the pen plotter was put to work here to animate an image of me speaking before the camera. As usual, I am concerned with my relation to the moment, and in a more general way, how it is that artists negotiate a triangulation between participation and criticality towards the trends of the day.