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.

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.

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.

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.

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.