Portfolio

The anti-opera, "I Could Not Sing," revisits an early video work, "see also 0502.2156" (May 2, 2003), created mostly in Mathematica, and assembled from frames and sound output by programming in that system into a fixed length video.

I sought relief from the machinic bounds of my software practice in figure drawing — an immersion in the organic. Charcoal drawing is messy. The human body is an infinitely fascinating and diverse source of forms to study, feelings to have, and meanings to contemplate. In the 20 weeks at  23rd Street Studio, Michael Markowitz exhorted us to focus on feeling, encouraging a drawing practice based in instinct and authenticity. It was a struggle, not just with my clumsy hands, but to focus my conceptually oriented mind in a different way.

I don’t draw. I write code that becomes drawing by a machine. Though I have art training, I never really learned to draw that well. I’m a conceptualist. I dwell mostly in the realm of ideas. I explore the aesthetic shadows of thinking.

So what interested me, and motivated my time in Michael Markowitz's 23rd Street Studio, was the interplay between my own mind and body's habits and tendencies, and the possibilities of paper and charcoal — which are also distinct and particular. 

No.

Just that. Refusal. Opposition. Resistance.

Is there a "mute refusal that dissolves power"?

Color is imagined as a space. This work is one of my earliest, a browser art piece from 2001. It was originally accomplished using frames for the color cells. This version is rewritten for the contemporary browser (in 2024).

Gradient noise — an N-dimensional interpolated lattice of psuedo-random values — is an invaluable tool for computer graphics. In this project I used the FastNoiseLite library to sample a variety of noise algorithms (not just the first, and most common "Perlin Noise", Ken Perlin's 1982 invention).

I traced the contours by using the Processing Isolines library (marching squares algorithm) to map how the noise values cohere in different patterns depending on the type of noise and it's settings. 

This collaboration with the artist Seyed Alavi, once my neighbor, was prompted by my wanting to explain how it is I work to Seyed. Of course, I learned a lot about how Seyed worked as well. I translated his ideas for composition first into abstractions, and then into code. And as things go, for both artists and computer programs, divergent and branching developments ensued from both Seyed and myself. 

A Perlin-noise force field becomes visible through the trails of particles that traverse it, producing a sensuous 3-dimensional effect.

Like water reflecting an alien sky. There are waves, which fascinate me. Both the 2-D field and the color gradients are produced by waves. Playing with color, pattern, rhythm. Interpolation. Additive complexity. These are computational concepts that I often use and that constitute a style of computational aesthetic.

Because I often ask myself “What is the signature of the artist when compared to the gesture of the machine?”, I returned to the compound sine waves I explored years ago as “harmonographs”, this time to further interrogate the question of “line” and “hand” under the rubric of pseudo writing. 

In asemic writing, the style and gesture of writing becomes divorced from meaning. Examples are found in the modernist works of Cy Twombly and Henri Michaux, or in the more contemporary work of Mirtha Dermisache. 

In Motherwell's  "Elegies to the Spanish Republic," abstractions of bull testicals serve as symbolic links with heroic death in the bloodly tragic war with fascism. He ties the Spanish bullfighting culture—a spectacle of life and death embeded within the everyday—to the contemplation of a specific historical loss.

This software uses flocking algorithms as the basis for the composition of soundscapes. It is a meditation on the question of what the group is, and what its proper functioning is. If we seem to constantly be wondering if we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in a group, birds by contrast, know how to flock.

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.

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.

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.

Images produced through the algorithmic processing of the images of Abu Ghraib. It seems that we are in some way blind to them. And this processing, which is likewise blind, repeats a kind of failed accounting for what the images show. We have failed to see, failed to reckon with, and failed to become accountable for that which the images bear witness to.

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 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.

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.