Bio

My work as an artist focuses on language, politics and software. The intention of this practice is to press the artifacts and techniques of computation's ubiquity towards a connection with the social and intellectual circumstances of their context. To this end, I have produced websites, videos, software applications, and robots, all of which have at their core a deep commitment to understanding the political, philosophical and cultural implications of computer technology.

Software, as an art practice, promises to break open the question of artistic labor. Can the notion of signature and gesture remain the same when compared to the production of unique and recognizable graphemes by a machine? Immaterial, and indeterminate, software represents yet another challenge to the entrenched object centered practices, which have been attacked already by various conceptualist strategies for decades.

It has been important to insist that computation be understood not simply as a tool or a media, but as culture itself – a constructed, historically situated, and manipulable artifact of human sociality. It is also important to differentiate my practice from a simply technophilic enthusiasm for computers and new media. My commitment is not to software, per se, but rather to thinking, writing, and critique. I find it difficult not to account for the place of the thinking machines, however, in the contemporary scene, and perverse to not let those ubiquitous objects enter discourse as both signs and agents of moment.

I worked as a web developer through the 90s at various design and branding firms in the Bay Area, which gave me both technical insight and an understanding of how language and image are manipulated in corporate media. I hold a BA degree from the University of California Santa Cruz, a MA from the University of Chicago, and a MFA from the University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts. I have participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art, Independent Study Program for 2006-2007.