video

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.

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.

If life were a game, what game would it be? … It must be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest. The abstract field of contest is a schematic representation of the territory beneath our feet: a map of the world. It is at once a field of combat as an un-owned commons, and the territorialized space of land as possession, with all places and possible positions marked out. Against this grid the move is made; the move is measured. The pieces find their places.

Observe that even without a grid, the rooms you now inhabit are partitioned and assigned specific uses. How have these been determined and allotted? How is that one corner has become the territory of a certain artist, and one wall, the domain of another? This exhibition was "designed"; that is, the space was divided up and allocated to the participants.

Thus Arriving At The Possibility Of Computation. The invention of the computer is traced to what came to be called the Turing Machine after the author of the 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which it was proposed. The tragic life of the Alan Turing is here figured as an embodiment of his invention

Pornocopia imagines pornography as a machine, a system, a software, an algorithm: a device for the multiplication of desire or for the production of desire’s contagion. It is structured as 10 software mechanisms, which play out a sequence of state changes within a single minute while containing a series of porn images.

A culmination of the work with harmonographs, this piece incorporates a sound track which was constructed using techniques analogous to the curves, and a voice-over which makes links between the abstract forms and social, sexual, and computational concepts. It is the first step in a narrativizing thrust of the work.