allegory

Flock Music

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.

June, 2013

In \a\ Place of Small Crows

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.

March, 2011

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.

January, 2011

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.

December, 2008

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.

March, 2008

The Game Of Life

If life were a game, what game would it be? Certainly not the game of all possible games. And not Magister Ludi 's Glass Bead Game: the aesthetic athletics of the intellect. It must rather be either war or race; in either case, it is a contest.

Not the Only Game in Town

Experiments which aim to queer the rules of the game foreground the conventionality of rules, the arbitrariness of rules, the relationship of agency to rule making, the location of changing rule sets within the diachrony of history, and the aesthetic nature of rules and rule making.

Floor Plan

Entering a space makes us subject to its rules; the door divides our attention between a self-conscious appraisal of our conformity to law, and a referencing of the room's markers of convention with our internalized archive of applicable statute. It is rare that habitation includes an invitation to invent a manner of being in the place.

May, 2007

Contest: War and Peace

There is a new archive of photography, and the photograph itself is changed. The archive is the structured columnar accumulation of endless banality to which any- and everyone contributes, and from which we all can also retrieve at will, and through those same worn channels, not just the singular image, but a stream of categorical similitude.

May, 2007

Nomic

Headphones haning on a wall in the installation.

This game models the self-amending rule set that is the basis of the American legal system. Suber, a logician, was interested in the paradoxes that arise in a system where logical contradictions inside of a self-amending rule set cannot be straightforwardly resolved.

May, 2007

Harmonomic

The ideology of individualism requires the maintenance of some semblance of interpersonal difference. The horror produced by the idea of cloning, or the imagined forced conformity of communist society, is surely tied to a certain attachment to the idea of difference. At the same time, conformity exerts a strong influence and difference is disciplined away.

May, 2007

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.

Computer Game: Play Station

Rules connect the world of games to the province of computation; rules are the mechanism of both domains. On the side of the machine, there is no fraught social predicament where adherence to rule is subject to a contest of will: computers follow rules as long as they are inscribed in the logic of the machine.

Game Theory

The idea of a theory of games arises in the middle of the twentieth century. What the science promised was a way to model and predict economic and political behavior that was assumed to follow the rational choices of individual actors.

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