paper – BENJAMIN DE KOSNIK

Star-X Mirrored and Southern Versions

Variable display size, displayed in multiple with optional 1080p projection. Portfolio of 3 burn/hope monoprints using laser-cut large-format debossing, lemon juice, isopropyl alcohol, lighters, flame, smoke and one imprint-only print. Open set of 3 with burn “X” monoprints one white print, on 300g/msq white velvet somerset paper, 30 by 44 inches (760mm x 1120mm). With Emily York and Courtney Sennish.

2023-ongoing

Two additional views for Star-X internet maps.

1. Southern Version.
Shifts perspective from centered on the globe from atop the North Pole one hundred and eighty degrees, to centered on the globe atop the South Pole. Also known as Antarctica. This continent is badly mangled in the Cahill-Keyes Butterfly M projection, and so the Southern Version centers it.

Although larger than Australia, the region is often mangled or otherwise neglected in cartographic projections. This forgotten continent with an unremembered shape will gradually coming into visible relief as climate melts the glacial ice hiding coastal land.

2. Mirrored Versions

Studies for comparing internet phenomena in Africa and the vast sparsely populated Pacific Ocean, often overlooked regions for internet analysis.

Agnes Denes Cartography

Tauba Cartography

John Cage Re-Performance, Variation, or After?
Cahill Keyes Star-X
Cahill Keyes Inverted Butterfly X

Star-X Internet Maps

2022-ongoing

Base projection for Star-X internet maps.

John Cage Re-Performance, Variation, or After?
Cahill Keyes Star-X
Cahill Keyes Inverted Butterfly X

Mueller Redactions Printed With Invisible Ink

Smoke, burn scars, lemon juice, hope on paper with all-over large-format laser debossing. Open set of 3 with “Enso/Zero” burn monoprints one white print, on 300g/msq white velvet somerset paper, 30 by 44 inches (760mm x 1120mm). With Emily York and Courtney Sennish.

2022

In 2019, a heavily-redacted version of the Mueller Report was made public. On the thirteenth of May 2022, another heavily-redacted addendum was made public as part of the Paul Manafort sentencing, the Mueller Manafort Response. Both of these documents together are 486 pages: if every page of the combined document was shrunk and put into a rectangular grid, the resulting document would fill the paper edge to edge, and each page would measure 1.75” tall by 1” wide.

The background image is this graphic projection, but only the parts of each page that have been redacted, blacking out the text and hiding meaning and comprehension. Many pages (and key parts of these documents) are unintelligible to the public, years and years after the events described.

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Profound thanks to Alex Thompson at Pagoda Arts, Emily York and Courtney Sennish at Crown Point Press, Kate Randall (invisible ink, burn art history, burn safety), Ian Roxbourough (combustion).

Agnes Martin,
John Cage(1, 2)
Nam June Paik
Birgit Skiöld
Nance O’Banion
Jenny Holzer
Cai Guo-Qiang

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.

Mark Lombardi, Nugan Hand Bank Sydney Australia (Version 2)
Louise Drulhe, The Critical Atlas of the Internet

Alpha60 Archival Forms

a60-3-end a60-1-open a60-0-summer-stack

Installation, variable size. With six 8.5 x 11″ bound objects (100-600 pages), a combination of maps on washi (22 x 17″), and 1080p video (1-4 minutes).

2017, 2018, 2019, ongoing

An installation of artifacts from a research project exploring internet piracy as an instantiation of Nam June Paik’s Video Common Market. Due to the numerous technical and legal obstacles in studying peer to peer sharing behavior, the experimental data is anonymized and then materialized in archival art forms. These objects encapsulate the ephemeral nature of BitTorrent phenomena on the internet, guarding the privacy of individual internet users while providing media and communication scholars with accurate records of television circulation on the internet.

Alpha60
Nam June Paik Timeline
Alpha60 3D-Gun Files One Year (pdf)
Alpha60 Detective Chinatown 3 First 15 Weeks (pdf)

Politics of Friendship

Three framed inkjet prints, folds, Facebook social graph metadata. Dimensions H x W (18.5″ x 23.5″) and (38.25″ x 30.25″).

2016

Portfolio of three prints exploring visual forms for a social graph: each print is a separate variation on the metadata from a Facebook account associated with my household’s pet dog. Each of the works is a separate visualization of the connections between people on social networks, the arrangements of and inter-networks between relationships, and a psychogeographic mapping of social media space.

Pirate Passport
Proposal for a New Facebook Account Type: Monad

Broken Obelisk / Visual ChangeLog

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.

ChangeLog Complete Text (pdf)
Light Stele / Visual ChangeLog

Notes on the Grove

Notes on the Grove is 8.5 x 11 inches, 105 color pages, softbound.
Log for the Grove is 8.5 x 11 inches, 71 black and white pages, softbound.
Entertaining with Cannabis: A Journal of Concierge Services is 5 x 8 inches, 187 black and white pages, softbound.

Ongoing, started summer of 2015

Notes on the Grove is printed matter that links art practice to horticulture. This serial publication is a combination of The Surfer’s Journal with America’s Test Kitchen or PBS’ Mind of a Chef, but for the general theme of plant cultivation. The companion volume, Log for the Grove, is a blank workbook that contains typeset forms for recording details of botany experiments. A third volume, Entertaining with Cannabis: A Journal of Concierge Services, is an accompanying work of experimental fiction.All books are being given out to selected individuals to seed an exquisite-corpse style collaborative publishing project, due in 2016.

Notes on the Grove
Log for the Grove
Entertaining with Cannabis: A Journal of Concierge Services

All the Uhuras

Inkjet, lapis and silvertone wash, bamboo paper, paste. Dimensions for each are H x L (68 cm x 86.5 cm).

2014

Two prints, composed of 288 cropped images of Uhura from the television show Star Trek. Each frame of the first season is analyzed with facial recognition software, and found Uhura faces are either inscribed with tattoo-like circles representing individual facial detection algorithms, or scaled, cropped, and center-aligned via sophisticated image-processing routines. To offset the explicitly computed nature of this work, the images are aligned on broken grids, and floated on an organic background of silvertone metallic or lapis mineral pigments. With Emily York.

Machine is Learning
Equal Weight Uhuras

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.

Asama OG