Playing With Fire*




Inkjet on washi, folds, PVA adhesive, titanium-zinc white oil paint stick, mylar tape, washi tape, glitter, handwritten notes in graphite.

Playing With Fire* (Peer-Centered Network Map), double-sided inkjet and foldable. Dimensions 22H x 68W inches, unfolded. Edition of 5.

Upside-down At Any Angle (Peer-Centered Network Map), single-sided inkjet triptych of 31 x 22 inch panels. Dimensions 66H x 31W inches.

2019, 2020


Internet maps composed of three components: sixteen months of the locations of people that share gun files on the internet (black circles), the infrastructure of high speed optical fiber from submarine cables (yellow lines), and network bridges / exit nodes on the Tor network that link the internet to the dark web (red rays). The sampled data, the infrastructure data, and the dark web data are rendered onto the globe with a Cahill-Keyes projection.
On September 1, 2018, the United States Department of State banned Defense Distributed, a company in Texas, from the distributing files for the first 3D printed gun, the Liberator. These files immediately re-appeared on the dark web, on private download sites, attached as messages sent on phones, on peer-to-peer networks, and other networks all over the world. Since then, schematics for additional weapons have circulated, including AR-15, AK-47, Glock 17, and accessories such as large capacity magazines and bump fire gadgets. On the day of the ban, computers using custom software started sampling the internet to collect any data on users sharing these files, sampling peer-to-peer traffic to construct a sixteen-month history of network locations. The sampling effort, and the attempts to visualize this flow of virtual weaponry, continue into the present.

alpha60

The Alpha 60 Project: Bittorrent Cartography

Grid of 8 framed maps. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 1′). 2016

The OA, pirate distribution rendering via alpha60.

Grid of 8 framed maps. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 1′). 2016

The Walking Dead S07E08, SD pirate distribution rendering via alpha60.

Grid of 8 framed maps. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 1′). 2016

The Walking Dead S07E09, pirate distribution rendering via alpha60.

Grid of 8 framed maps. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 1′). 2016

Westworld S01E09, HD pirate distribution rendering via alpha60.

Grid of 10 framed maps. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 1′). 2016

The Expanse S02E03 pirate distribution rendering via alpha60.
Support Material