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.

Art Republishing Conundrum

Two archive images from Maria Porge’s article in American Craft, May 2007. A Whole Life: The Art (and Craft) of Ruth Asawa. The image on the left is a representation of the page as published. The image on the right is a representation of the original page with only the author text remaining.

How to think outside the cage that has grown up around art writing? Established art writers find it extremely difficult to find and make public past art writing. On-line archives for art magazines are more often than not missing , locked behind a paywall, and of poor quality. Subscriber archives at venerable publishers such as Art Forum consist of select articles since 2000, in the form of grainy screenshots of articles, often compressing both text and image into black and white jpegs of size 540 x 400. This tiny amount of information is equivalent to reading an Art Forum article on a 1980’s television, with 20% of the screen blocked by a potted plant. 

At the same time, galleries like Hauser Worth list archives of press for artists. Is there a way to level the playing field for the authors of the original article?

Reprinting past work within the current publishing and legal climate is especially difficult. Reprinting is especially tricky for art writing, due to an excessive combination of out-of-print art publications, a forking trail of long-dead publishers, haphazard archives, lost or vague contracts, and wishful-to-woeful adjudication of republishing rights. In addition, clearing image rights with any artists (or other rights holder) under discussion is also required, and perhaps the image-maker or recorder as well. The complexity quickly becomes overwhelming, contributing to art history’s glacial pace at online organization and digitization?

An alternative that many art writers employ is to scan the print article and put links to the PDF’s. Depending on the publishing contract, authors may have explicit rights to do this. Some publishers put free versions of their publication or specific articles on their own websites, suitable for re-linking by authors. Several writers do full bibliographies with links to available PDF files.

What is best practice? What is legal? What is common? Could higher-resolution files for Art Forum be hosted at the internet archive?

How does this fit into the author/writer/artist identity elsewhere on the web? Is it linking to an academic or organizational affiliation? Or to academia.edu? Is it this linking to an amazon.com author page? Is it linking to the art writer’s canonical home page?

Is there another way? Is there a way to explicitly manufacture a transformation such that the new media archive’s existence has legal standing? Can transformative works be used to republish and protect fair uses for any of three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who could not read the print versions?

 

Proposal for a new Facebook account type: monad

Something so simple that it can be described via a phone keyboard.

Current Facebook account types are: organization, person, fictional character. May I suggest one more? 

Introducing the monad account type. This is an account by a person, using their real name, that has no wall and accepts no friend invitations. This account type can join groups, and sign up for event notifications. 

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.

Broken Obelisk / Visual ChangeLog

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Two inkjet prints (each 18″ x 84″), momigami wrinkles, cast concrete, EMT conduit, LED lights, arduino, sensors, custom software, google drive archive. Dimensions H x L x W (8′ x 6′ x 3′).

2016


New media sculpture and advertisement for a virtual archive hosted on Google Drive. The archive includes all the reading, projects, visual reference material, and audio recordings made over a three-month period at the end of 2015. Entries to the archive were indexed by a written log, aka ChangeLog, a text file that records participation details: in this case, it includes hours consumed by participants, size of media contributed, storage location in the archive, and date.

Equal Weight Uhuras

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Two to six channel video art installation. Two to six 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted adjacent to each other in landscape orientation, synchronized 19:44 minute 1080p loops.

2015


Samples six characters from two seasons of Star Trek episodes, and re-constructs two seasons in a condensed form, where all the characters have the same amount of “screen time” as the character Uhura, with the added proviso that all the characters are shown talking equally to each other in a random fashion, or conversing alone with a representation of space.

Valentine Homography


Two Channel Video Art Installation. Two 34 inch LED televisions, wall-mounted to be touching in landscape orientation, two 19:44 minute 1080p synchronized loops playing a metadata composition generated by combining portrait photography, tumblr and pinterist social media image scrapes, and computer vision software.

2015


Experiments with color contour detection in images, using the SURF homography algorithm in the Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) software library. I apply this algorithm as a Trevor Paglen-defined seeing machine to social media images: profile portraits, liked images, and disliked images. This computational lens simulates computer matchmaking in a visual form that is but one instance in a sea of many thousand “known-good” or positive test cases that the machine learning behind websites such as Facebook, Tindr, Grindr, OkCupid, Match.com, Jdate.com, etc. must crunch to create a single user’s match.

To create this positive test case, I collaborated with my real-life partner to stage ten normcore portraits counter to the prevailing profile portraiture aesthetic, collected forty images from each of our preferred social medias that were positive, and ten that were negative. These input images were used by the machine learning system to simulate what a positive match “looks like” when using its “match the humans” algorithm.

Light Stele / Visual ChangeLog

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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.