writing

The Impact of Neoliberal Policies on Education in California

This text was meant to be delivered at a teach in at the State Building in San Francisco on March 1, 2012, as part of the Occupy Education National Day of Action. (Instead, this happened: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1O8ujvJENI#t=10m00s >.)

Parametric Protest

The current Occupy protests embody a structure of dissemination and of identification that is also in evidence in computational media.

Occupy ________

A guide for those still feigning perplexity. (Do you know who you are?)

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.

Rules, Games, Theories

These essays are from the catalog of "The Rules of the Game | The Game of the Rules." They attempt to frame the constellation of game, software and political allegory that were at the center of that project. An edition of 100 copies of the catalog were printed and distributed at the Whitney ISP exhibition at Artist Space.

Inscription of the Girly Man: The Politics of Stupidity in the Age of Intelligent Machines

This set of texts constitute the catalog for the installation "Inscription of the Girly Man." It's essays cover topics which range from language and machines, to the function of material metaphor in art, and finally to the vagaries of contemporary political rhetoric.

Do You Feel Me Now?

The reception of Bridget Riley's paintings in the 60s serve as an example for thinking about how a notion like kinesthetic empathy might be used to explain a viewers relationship to painting. It suggests a path away from an insistently integrative ego that is incapable of an empathetic attitude towards the other constructed within an unbridgeable difference.

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?

10 concepts of computation (arranged in order of increasing outrageousness)

The ideational threads that weave their way through this list summarize the obsessions that motivated my work during the five previous years. There is a trajectory here: from a concern for the abstract, theoretical underpinnings of computer technology, to the intertwining of technical and cultural logics in the lives and politics of the people who create and use computers.

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.

Matthew Barney and a Klein Bottle of Vaseline

In reading Barney’s work, what is at stake is the question of the possible transformations of masculinities in a milieu which must account for the critiques not just of feminism but of queerness.

Super-Abstract: Software Art and a Redefinition of Abstraction

Abstraction is a prevalent tendency in software art and might be understood as an anachronistic return to the forms of high modernism, or alternatively, as a phenomenon that has its roots within the nature of software itself.

The Discourse on “Love Between Men” in Interwar Japan: Iwata’s History of Homosexuality

Between 1920 and 1945, Iwata Jun’ichi carried out an unprecedented, extensive research project on the history and literature of homoeroticism in Japan.