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.

Marihuana Smokes Herself

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Three LED displays, wall mounts, 3 media files, 2 lights, 2 framed photos, 2 cloth pots, one rug, one sofa, two freestanding tumbleweed sculptures. Dimensions H x L x W (9′ x 9′ x 9′).

2016


Three channel video installation featuring a supercut of clips extracted from film and television depicting cannabis use, production, and distribution. My practice is to watch media and note any cannabis on the screen, as if I were a media censor in a time and space of total cannabis prohibition. Over time,this process has created a growing archive of clips that depict cannabis as a character in the larger war on drugs. The sequenced clips in this video installation use this archive, but only the parts that contain a female character on the screen. This subset is further  shaped by new searches gathered from exit interviews, and then using these terms to create subsequent loops with suggested searches such as “giggling,” power and money, dealing, actual medical use, and others.

Tumbleweed

Tumbleweed #2Tumbleweed #1Tumbleweeds (Studio install)


Installation, size variable. One 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted in landscape orientation, playing a variety of animated GIFs. One, two, or three forms composed of: recycled 1 gallon black plastic pots, two hundred dried and trimmed medical cannabis stems, physical therapy foam cylinders and spheres, four flowering cannabis plants, white paint. Size variable.2015


A medical cannabis grower in Northern California gave me two enormous bales of over a hundred individual plant stems. I took these discarded remains of medical cannabis cultivation, created temporary forms, and photographed these arrangements. Then, these photographs were animated, and displayed in the background for the next version of the forms, which incorporate more and more cast-off material as the cannabis plants in the next harvest continue through their life cycle.

Asama Loops

Benjamin De Kosnik - Asama Loops

Asama Loop 6 Roji (left), 2015
3:15 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Vsync 8 (right), 2015
5:13 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Vband 4 (left), 2015
1:00 minutes, 1920 x 1080

Asama Loop 6 Pink Buddah Dot (right), 2015
5:13 minutes, 1920 x 1080


Two-channel video art installation, size variable. One or two 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted in portrait orientation to be adjacent or line-of-sight, two 54:00 minute 1080p synchronized loops.

2015


A site-specific video art installation, inspired by artist books produced by foreign artists visiting Japan: Kathan Brown (Paradise, 1982), John Cage (Silence, 1961), and Birgit Skiold (Zen Gardens, 1973). This work combines the transnational print and video aesthetics of three countries into a new hybrid form. Not wishing to be bound to a fixed form on paper, a visual machine constantly creates new video combinations from three main sources: the garden landscapes posted on social media at the Nezu Museum in Japan, three pure colors, and multiplications of pure color with printing plate engraving marks and noise. The generated images are re-inscribed from paper to a video screen with the carousel swipes of the contemporary mobile web mixed with simulated vertical rolls and glitch found in experimental video art by Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol. The result is a combinatoric, ever-changing iconography machine spanning contemporary San Francisco, Tokyo, and London.

Light Stele / Visual ChangeLog

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VZKiXnZb0I&autoplay=0&loop=1&rel=0&w=480&h=270&showinfo=0]


Installation with double-sided inkjet prints, bends, magnets, LED light strips, arduino, sensor, controlling software, acrylic mirrors. With Barney Haynes and Michael Shiloh.

2014


Installation exploring individual versus group credit, and the position of the individual in art versus science communities. In the science world, there is an idea of a ChangeLog file, a text file hosted on the internet with minimal formatting containing a log of activity for all individual participants on a larger work, sorted by date. This is a useful reference for answering the questions: who, what, and when in the context of a collaborative work, and is mirrored in primary researcher/principal investigator and researcher credits when publishing. Applying this process idea from the sciences to art production, all production and conception work is logged for the creation of this light sculpture.

Drug Money

drug_money_01_all_3kc


Aluminum briefcase, lab stand, US dollar-sized washi paper made from Thai kozo and Filipino abaca with shredded USD and medical cannabis trim, beakers, pH and ppm measuring devices, dried medical cannabis plants, money bands. With Nance O’Banion, Michelle Murillo, Aaron Eliah Terry, and Abigail De Kosnik.

2014


Installation using the remains of medical cannabis cultivation, the sale of which equaled the equivalent dollar amount and time duration as one semester of Federal work-study.

The Machine Is Learning The Man Trap

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Week One

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Week Two

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Week Three


3 weeks, 2 LED displays, articulating wall mounts, pink-filtered sunlight, 8 media files. Dimensions H x L x W (6′ x 6′ x 1′).

2014


Durational video installation. Displayed videos are generated from a computational media project that uses facial and object recognition technology to create new characters and situations in classic media texts.

Two screens are mounted on a wall, slightly pointed inwards so that the shadows of the screens create eye-shaped shadows. Each screen shows a loop, which is changed every week. As the weeks progress, “the machine” leans more about detecting and recognizing faces: simultaneously recognizing more characters with greater accuracy, and yet at the same time negating the human form with an algorithmic representation of the covered face. By the last week, all faces are replaced with faceless humans with an accumulation of algorithmic depictions.

Capp Street Rooftop Sand Drifts

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqtR4SB1p94&autoplay=1&loop=1&rel=0]
Experiment #1, Day #0
Site Location #1 Westward

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMAQ8nqF1Mo&autoplay=1&rel=0]
Experiment #1, Day #2
Site Location #3 Overhead, Low Tide to Sunset 4x


Durational site-specific installation. Sand, wind, time, shaped by wood and acrylic blades.

2014


Experiments with site-specific and durational sculpture, in the form of human-engineered aeolian landscapes. Still photography and video documentation of the installation site at initial placement, and then at hour or day intervals to record formed shapes.