long term writing projects: "imaginary landscapes / aria"
(made for print, presented on website designed for digital display)
what follows is an attempt to enter into collaboration with a computerized system to develop a psychosexual poetics of illegibility, self-negation, and masochism. each poem will consist of the curated output of an adaptive algorithm formed in python using open source machine learning and natural language processing libraries tensorflow, keras, and textgenernn to train itself on a source text and create an original imitation. i have found the process of reading this material is based less in post-facto semeiotic recognition and more in experiencing the affect of purely optical scanning. words are not understood so much as they are looked at. what is written is far less important than what is seen. the source texts will not be reprinted here, as the idea of an unread story is far more important than the experience of a consummated one. in this respect the process of coding the true author of this text has been a means of capturing a purely self-effacing mode of reading: wherein meaning is not personally made so much as it is impersonally facilitated and chased after within an impossibly closed system. this process is often frustrating, and it is most always fruitlessly self-denying, but there is ultimately always something to be learned from the experience of wanting something you yourself have designed to be ever-beyond: just on the horizon but tantalizingly impossible. there is itself a sort of pleasure to lingering on the primal trauma of separation from the infant’s experience of monism. the extent to which our engagement with systems mirrors the urge to swallow a continuously occurring mode of total control into our bodies informs how we might consider our aims in developing virtuality. our relationship to the mother has informed and constructed our relationship to the text. where we seek to act out our vengeance against her to inadvertently test the boundaries of the real, so too do we seek to harm our modes/systems of reading to verify their being. recuperation from this urge, however, necessitates a recognition of responsibility to the ego – to ourselves. algorithmic composition, however, suggests the possibility of a poetics removed from the self, and thus an experience of reading removed from re-enforcing its boundaries, even reifying its existential necessity. this thanatosian poetry is then the continual re-enacting of the original trauma of distance by way of wholly separating the poetic text from interpersonal authorship, and from collective legibility at all. there is no real way to relate to the writing itself, and thus you must accept its innate alterity. rather than negate reading entirely, however, this alienation feels like pleasure. it feels like pleasure in the deepest, most childish, most ill-advised pit of your being – and to indulge it, to keep reading anyway, is a life-affirming sign that despite seeking out the things that hurt us most, we will always believe that they hold some promise of salvation: of a rapture we know will never come – and that such a feeling alone is enough.
april 2021
long term video project: "life/like"
(three channel video, screen)
'life/like' stages varied technological imitations of nature, and investigates the degree to which nature-as-symbol has itself evolved into algorithmic process. utilizing the open source creative coding library p5.js, the outermost channels of video run through handmade javascript expressions modeling a spirograph and brownian motion, respectively. while the spirograph may seem to mirror an infinitely recursive fractal, it is in fact created solely from the concentric movement of widening and tightening circles, often accomplished on paper by a plastic toy, and entirely manmade. brownian motion, however, is the name given to the observed movement patterns of particles suspended in a liquid or gaseous medium. where the subtly regimented spirograms look sweeping and gentle, mimicking the arc of a plant’s timelapsed growth or a pinecone’s layers, the atomic movement of a particle's position inside a fluid subdomain appears erratic and simulated, betraying its origins in the innate laws of particle physics. in this respect the state of ‘seeming natural’ or according with the cultural history of nature-as-symbol is problematized, and the generated actions of computers – themselves the summation of a thousand firing electrons, is allowed to enter into the natural’s symbolic life. where ascott foresees a newly organic future facilitated by increasingly immersive technologies, my use of generated patterns and multi-channel video seeks to understand the ways in which the seeds of this future are already inextricably bound to our perception of the tools which enable it. this virtualized nature is not itself a dissent from the natural world, but rather from the idea of nature as an itemized phenomenon. as seen in the slow introduction of virtuality into our systems, the degree to which we are allowed to understand the bounds of our surroundings is presently the degree to which it discursively exists. natural tropes are indeed nature at its most hyper-visual and soulless, but the technological can offer us a gateway into what lies beyond. the movement of the three video channels interact as interlaced found footage blends natural symbology with rote pattern, algorithmic generation, and most importantly, the visualization of both nature and technology’s operational mechanisms. these representations are themselves inevitably crude and ineffectual, yet the border at which human knowledge attempts to integrate the natural or the techno-natural into its empirical organization is the onus of potential change. in time, the competing sound and images crescendo into a virtual reality landscape, deeply artificial yet singular in its affective potential: a parallel nature, a transhumanist eden. herein is our future: telematic culture set in electronic space, turned inward to the individual experience, facilitating self-transformation not by way of magic or representation, but the virtual.
january 2021 – april 2021
undergraduate thesis installation: "Y/N""
(continually updating display, installation on screen)
consisting of multiple python and javascript programs running concurrently on an attached microcomputer, this project aggregates recently uploaded works from popular fanfiction communities and synthesises them in real time into its own textual creation. each word displayed here is a word which real fingers have typed within the last few minutes – the dynamic nature of the source code ensures that this is but one window into a live collaboration of hundreds of unknown authors which spans the duration of the work’s installation. the program simulates a crude sort of learning as it re-assembles the material it finds to incoherent ends using an algorithmic lens on something as unpredictable as human speech. by way of this inherently flawed technology the genre conventions, language, and syntax of the self-authored meta-narrative can be isolated and interrogated, and a resulting disjointed text not beholden to a single story but evoking the distinctly digital affect of this misunderstood creative phenomenon is formed.
february 2021 – march 2021
public installation: "channeling (iii)"
(single channel video, screen)
video provided is a detail of a public vhs tape looping installation in the simons center for fine arts during the week of march 25th 2021.
march 2020
video experiment: "oblivion (rework)"
(single channel video, screen)
made from discarded raw visual/auditory material from "nothing hurts, and you won't be" (2020).
september – december 2020
long term video project: "nothing hurts, and you won't be"
(single channel video accompanied by performance, screen)
the world is overflowing with sadness. people are surrounded by emptiness, and loneliness has filled their hearts. / if it’s that painful, you can stop. / if you really don’t like it, you can run away. / do you want to be at ease? to feel at peace? do you want to become one with me? to have our bodies and souls become one? / but if i have to be with you, i’d rather die! / don’t worry. all living things have the ability to return to their original form, and for the heart to go on living. / reality does involve pain, but you just have to accept it. / anywhere can be heaven as long as you have the will to live.
found footage cut, distorted, displayed, re-recorded, manipulated algorithmically, and layered. audio sampled, transformed, and arranged. all code, editing, and recording done by hand. september-november 2020, image shows installation and facilitated performance in the halsey institute of contemporary art.
november 2020
photo series: "untitled screen display (1-13)"
(digital photographs, screen)
the extent to which the screen mediates a transfer of information is never neutral or traceless, and thus a closer examination of the technological mechanisms that constitute television also functions as a subversion of its traditional politics. an image’s smallest denomination of individual cathode ray diodes are at any moment all visible, and yet one still sees beyond, or because, of the means of the light’s formation into shape. i aim to hold your view right at the scale where abstraction borders on legibility, and to in consequence incite an experience wherein one’s own individual perception forms the significance behind these isolated moments of expression.
october 2020
video experiment: "4:39"
(single channel video, screen)
created in response to an open-ended 'image' assignment.
september 2020
video experiment: "beta sessions (holophrasis.exe)"
(single channel video, screen)
session 1 investigates the holophrastic stage of language development, where the child is able to reproduce sounds of combined words but not not fully ascertain their distinction, as a greater symbol of the ego’s integration into the symbolic order. action is staged in the digital realm as a computerized consciousness passes through the pre-libidinal stages of development, articulating and mimicking signs like a child learning to speak. the fundamental trauma of the distinction between souls is embodied in the severance of the mother/child bond, enacted with humanity as the parents of digital simulacra. what does it mean to be born without a body?
january – may 2020
long term video project: "slow death"
(single channel video, screen)
A man is confronted with the necrophilic reality of his obsession as the object of his desire is killed. A love affair with the image of a woman is an eventual commitment to the dissolution of her mortal body. Is man’s obsessive union with the feminine ideal impossible? Does the violence by which it operates prohibit it from moral purity? As romantic fulfillment falls short of its remedial promise and feminine symbols are abstracted from bodies, what are you willing to sacrifice for beauty?
Image shows installation in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art
april 2020
photo series: "channeling (i/ii)"
(digital photographs, screen)
“the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”
august 2019 - march 2020
long term photo project: "only acting"
(35mm film, silver gelatin prints)
casting my friends into the roles of indistinct cinematic characters, my initial work emphasizes the role of performance in the construction of identity, and the ways in which images haunt the ways in which we imagine ourselves. initially drawn to the medium by photographers like cindy sherman, yasumasa morimura, and alex prager, deconstructing the notion of feminine identity and tracing the aftermath of the dominant image culture of the 20th century entailed the creation of elaborately staged extra-cinematic portraiture, negating the notion of a photographic aesthetic truth by wielding archetypes of performativity against their functionalities.
august 2019 - present
miscellaneous outtakes, curiosities, investigations
