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politics

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.

The Only Rule You May Be Told Is This One

Screenshot showing white text on black background.

The game of Mao has many rules, but only one that is spoken: "The only rule that may be told is this one." This game models a rule set located in the social in such a way that the articulation of the rules is prohibited while their obsessive instantiation is required.

May, 2007

Floor Plan

Floor Plan: Installation view of floow with grid.

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

Game Board

Whiteboard with messages from gallery goers.

The rule exists as a social given, like language, that precedes our presence and conditions our participation as the horizon of social legibility. Apprehension of convention in this manner, as fixed and immutable, suspends us in the place of the other, somehow outside of the history of consensus-making, and outside of the political, and therefore, merely subject to it.

May, 2007

Contest: War and Peace

Sreenshot: Contest–War and Peace: showing soldier and flaq.

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

State of the Union

State of the Union Screenshot of project home page.

State of the Union (SOTU) provides access to the corpus of all the State of the Union addresses from 1790 to 2010. SOTU allows you to explore how specific words gain and lose prominence over time, and to link to information on the historical context for their use.

May, 2006

Inscription of the Girly Man

Inscription of the Girly Man Installation (close-up of hammer drill)

Inscription is an exploration of the aesthetics of power in relation to the task of writing. Here, in a time when the neo-fascist spirit is casting a shadow across the political culture, and when the possibility of meaningful political discourse seems more and more remote because of it, there is a relationship between the wealth of violence–war, images of brutality–and the poverty of our communications. There is a relationship between the denigration of thoughtfulness as weakness, femininity, and gayness, and the impossibility of halting the campaign of aggression that the U.S. has embarked on, or of furthering stalled progress in the domain of civil rights or economic justice.

May, 2005

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.