software

Thinkings: How Computers Change The Way We See By Altering The Way We Think

For Southern Exposure, I produced a book and a discusion series that explores the impact of computers on visuality in art practice and the practice of everyday life.

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99 Bottles x 12 or Studies in Impatience

Taking off from the children's song, "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall," this piece creates allegorical software in which the path of drawing turtle of logo progressively gets more wobbly.

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Soft Monkey

Animal painting is popular again; the evidence is on YouTube. But it was popular in the Fifties and Sixties too and taken seriously by some in the art world and certainly by some biologists. Congo, the painting chimpanzee was a star.

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brokenWave

Broken Wave is a "data toy." It generates both sound and visuals based on a complex sign wave function that can be modulated and manipulated by the user using mouse gestures.

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Abu Ghraib

The infamous photos of Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004. Now, four years later, we are still debating the ethics of torture, and are still apparently unable to really process the contents of the images we received from the American dungeons of Iraq.

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Journal of American Thought Crime

The question of what it is possible to think under the current regime of the United States, and what it might be possible to think sheltered from the threat of government surveillance is the journal's main concern. The Journal of American Thought Crime distributes a literary magazine in the form of an encrypted mailing list.

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A C[o]unt of the Womb

A particular figure of absence seems to possess a suspicious connotative efficacy in its deployment within language and as a visual figure. What is at stake in the use of the empty square?

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The Container Object as a Structure of Concept and Computation

The Turing machine (and thus, the computer) resembles the generalized semiotic structure. It consists of the conjunction of two series inside of a container. One series is made up of states out of a set of finite possibilities, the order of which proceeds by means of a determinate set of rules.

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Untitled (After Riley)

Clearly the desire for the same is operative in various ways in many domains: at the level of nationality, within the social, in terms of class, or by political identifications, subcultures, etc. Just as frequently, the desire for the same is challenged by its opposite: the desire for the different.

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A Children's Game Transformed by the Solvent of Computational Method Thus Allowing for the Displacement of a Moral Overlay ...

... by a Free Play of Algorithmic Patterning. In modeling the game Chutes and Ladders on a computer, we gain insight into the nature of both games and computation. The computer version, unlike the rule bound cardboard version, is unfixed, thus allowing for the displacement of a moral overlay by a free play of algorithmic patterning. The abstraction of the model preserves a structure but unleashes a principal of variation: the computer makes every constant a variable (as Marcos Novak observes as he describes the liquefaction of architecture). The arbitrariness of particular rules becomes evident.

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