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AN/ARCHAEOLOGY or A Solvent History (in progress, 2020-2021) 
Video Installation, Sculptures, Images

The impermanence of a historical identity and present intersects with the boundaries of a spectral understanding–history and presence is an intangible vapor that shifts in direct relationship to media apparatuses. Our perceptions of time are thus signified in accordance to our engagement with authorship, apparatus and network conveyance, that is, the telemetric receivers. 

A Solvent History thus deconstructs the historical lens in accordance to states of matter through Procedural Simulation, Neural Network Imaging and Archival Research :

SOLIDS

THE EVENT

THE PRESENT/PRESENCE

THE COGNITION + ACTUALIZATION OF SELFHOOD

LIQUIDS

MYTH CULTURE

THE DISSEMINATION OF ARTIFICES

HISTORICAL TRANSIENCE

DOCUMENT

GAS

DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

ALGORITHMIC PREPROCESSING

IDEOLOGICAL TARGET PRACTICE

PLASMA

HYPERSHARING + MEME FACTORIES

SUPERSONIC PRESENCE

REALITY REPLICATED THROUGH ARTIFICE

Still Life Arrangement, 2020
Photogrammetry, 8″ x 16″
Collaboration with Jamie Kyle

Integrated into a series of works now acknowledged as The Electric Sublime . Hundreds or thousands of images are extracted from the environment, sorted through computational photography and rendered out through 3D graphics software. I collaborated with artist Jamie Kyle to construct the final image for printing in an upcoming issue for the Halophyte Collective.

surfing, 2019
HD Video
Single Channel Loop
30:00 min
6:30 min excerpt

surfing is a reconstruction of a one hour internet streaming performance seeking out the secrets of immortality using only online search algorithms. The original recording is digitally mapped to a series of 3D models that hover and morph over stock footage of an ocean. surfing acts as a humorous homage to both the original installation, The Fountain of Youth (2016), and in reference to the cathartic process of late nights drifting from website to website in search of content.

a farewell to images, 2019
6 channel installation view at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

a farewell to images is the concluding chapter in a trilogy of works I wrote and produced (including NO LAND ISLAND, 2016 and |human|, 2017) utilizing digital media as an apparatus to investigate language, post-internet identity and existential inquiry. The three chapters are presented within the space to reveal my four year evolution of craft, philosophy and identity while working through this series.

a farewell to images, 2019
3 channel projection
synchronous loop
16:00 min

a farewell to images is a visual poem invoking the evolution of images from antiquity to contemporary in connection to Andre Malraux’s Psychology of Art and his musée imaginaire by analyzing the cognitive relationship between images, artifacts and collections. I explore these notions of a mnemonic collection in relationship to personal identity, loss and trauma as society gravitates towards social engineering piloted by deep fakes, artificial intelligence and through the simplification of media-generating technology.

a farewell to images is an elegy to stillness, to silence and to solitude. As real-time video feeds abstract and accelerate ideologies and the documents in our lives we must remember:

we become what we see 

|human|, 2017
HD Video
two channel synchronous loop
11:15 min

|human| continues my examination of artificial intelligence & existential inquiry through two synchronized CinemaScope formatted projections. The piece, scripted as a dialogue between two synthetic entities, is a recollection of highly diametric origins & perspectives about the world around us. Corporeal landscapes are ushered up from virtual environments, 3D models of humans fuse with art historical images & the room, alive with sound, hums in unison to the two entities.

NO LAND ISLAND, 2016
HD Video
single channel loop
10:41 min
website: nolandisland.com

Text extract from website:
How is identity refracted through our technological selves and how does contemporary media we engage with affect our perceptions of self hood?

By tapping into the constructs of “island as a ghost response” the phenomenological associations imposed on islands are simultaneously romanticized utopias of collectivism and harbingers of dystopian individualist paranoia.

(see: Lost, Huxley’s The Island, Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, et al.)

Islands are associated with secrets and definitive perimeters of exploration and, to shrink these brush strokes, our engagement with computer technologies are equally isolated and connected to a vast expanse of information and virtual space. Our associations of time within these virtual portals creates a microcosmic system of solitude that mirrors properties of islands and often disassociates our ability to discover answers, but instead guides us on a search for endless secrets.

searching…, 2018
HD Video
single channel loop
8:00 min

The sounds activate the memory of water, the fluidity, the channels of H2O that once flooded these banks. The echoes of water are further replicated in the movements of the figures walking within the figure. Our shadows have imperceptible depth.

Portraits of Self Destruction (a precursor to forgetting), 2018
HD Video
single channel loop on portrait orientation TV
13:45 min

PERMADEATH, 2017-Present
Collaborative Installation
Slide 1: Installation View
Slide 2: Installation View
Slide 3: Installation View of artist Chris Kelly’s MUST HAVE BEEN ONE HELL OF A STRONG ROPE

I: WE PERFORM OUR WORLDS IN OUR IMAGE

I investigate virtual and real-life communities under the guise of a game exploring the social capital and exchanges of power that exist within these communities. 30 artists were invited to create a society, along with an artifact that represents it, to examine the artist’s limitations within such an expansive question.

PERMADEATH is a game. The game is inclusive and membership is free. PERMADEATH exists online and offline. The game has no beginning or end. Our offline/online one-on-one discussions become the medium of the game. The game itself is an ecosystem. This exhibition is a result of a larger game, one of social capital and exchange of power. This exhibition portrays artifacts from round one of this game.

Natalie Oliver
Nic Courdy
Oliver Downen
Patrick Charles
Paul Roessler
Robin Clark
Ron Brown
Scott Beadles
Simon Blundell
Stephanie Clark
Susannah Israel
Tabitha Nikolai
Tanner K Williams
Tanja London
Zoë O’Brien

PERMADEATH, Installation Video Documentation, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018

PERMADEATH, Screenshot of the online community site I built to communicate with the participants. Website: permadeath.online

Words are Water, 2017
Collaborative Installation

Audiovisuals and Installation: Jörmungandr [we devour we], HD Video, Single Channel Projection, 8:00 min, drinking water imported from a glacier, water cooler
by Tim Grant & Justin Watson

Plasticized History Water Cooler
by David Sadler & Kayla Sudweeks

WORDS ARE WATER infers the mutability of language and how it shifts according to time, context and memory. WORDS ARE WATER is the title of the overarching installation created by Computer Engineer Tim Grant & Artist Justin Watson, with two key components that reinterpret this title. Jörmungandr [we devour we], is a multimedia installation using drinking water and audio sourced from arctic glaciers. Jörmungandr is a mythological Nordic ouroborous, or world devourer, and by inviting the viewer to partake in drinking this water, they, too, are confronted with a choice to drink this exotic water at the cost of engaging in a mutually destructive act. This dynamic between the viewer and what we consume directs us to the complexities of existing within a system where the limits of our engagement with the world around us is much more vast and geopolitically oriented than we may realize. The viewer is reminded of this dynamic with a lengthy circuit of words lining the top of the water bottle: “water is life is water is life is water is…”

The audiovisuals are an interaction between Tim Grant’s audio and Justin Watson’s visuals that fluidly shift from existential meditations and political subtexts. The video, outside of the title, lacks any specific voice over or text and relies on purely sonic and visual experiences connected to water to form a narrative. After the finalization of the audiovisual components, Justin and Tim to challenged their notions of interpretation and conceptualization of the topic by inviting two painters to translate their work onto the surface of the water cooler housing the arctic glacier drinking water. The painters, David Sadler and Kayla Sudweeks, worked collaboratively to interpret and reconsider Justin and Tim’s original idea through their water cooler painting, Plasticized History, reinforcing the shifting nature of ideas, words and perception.

…the future is the past is the future is the past…, 2017
Four Channel Installation, Laser Cut Signs, Modified Gaming Chairs
Slides 1-3:…the future is the past is the future is the past…, Finch Lane Gallery installation view, 2017

 …the future is the past is the future is the past is…  examines the mechanics of nostalgia and how the past has been weaponized into dystopic futures through toxic masculinity, banal political slogans and a call to return to a history that never happened. The exhibition includes a large-scale video projection, PARALLAX (2016), with modified surround sound gaming chairs, a new three channel TV installation, CERBERUS (2017), and a laser cut sign, 1844BETAMAN (2017), that acts as a working phone number and website providing insight into the history of toxic masculinity and multiple perspectives on the shapeshifting identity of contemporary man. 

Parallax is an often-used technological term to imply an object + distance relationship through the visual layering of elements to emulate a sense of spatial movement. I took this term and applied it to an extract of philosophical paradoxes: object/body orientations in relationship to the universal and how these self-identified spatial relationships appear to slow the further we distance ourselves from them. Bodies, for example, when decimated with the use of video games, become nonphysical abstractions.

text for parallax:

Last night my ____ accidentally shot ____ in the face with a .22 caliber rifle.

The bullet remains forever lodged in ____ skull.

We are not burying ____, but we carry ____ in our mind’s eye.

A formless structure, netted between our neurons.

Afterall, isn’t the scarification of the mind equivalent to the construction of a haunted house.

Our age is correlated to the ghost’s we haul around within us.

I can remember ____ when I was a child, putting on ____ prosthetic leg.

The awe of a new leg.

A body extension.

A plastic appendage grafted with gravity.

I gazed from my _____ kitchen at ___ hopping around my ____ backyard on one leg.

___ trembled two beats before stopping and ____ leaned over.

____peeled up a pant leg, revealing a luminous ball of smooth flesh, rounded off by the blade of a skilled surgeon.

The skin of that appendage glows, expands to fill a room.

The room becomes a house.

A house becomes a city.

____ is here, the corpuscles of ___ leg bleeding from one mnemonic recall to the next.

The appendage becomes an artifact.

The artifact becomes an appendage.

At ___ house.

In ____ yard, where ____ is carrying ____ lighting kits.

____ played in a band a long time ago.

_____ says ____ was talented.

I don’t know.

I was too young and now I’m too old to believe in the validity of my memories.

The gaps in time from then and now experience a broad expansion in their breadth.

Was it yesterday or was it yesteryear?

I can’t differentiate the real from the electric.

I can’t remember.

1-844-BETAMAN, 2017
Toll free number (still operational), laser cut signs

CERBERUS, 2017
HD Video
Center channel of three channel loop
7:52 min
Includes screen capture from this parallax site.

CERBERUS (Test Strips ver 1: DNA), 2017
HD Video
Left and right channels (mirrored) of three channel loop
7:23 min

Two channels of 1980s era vaporwave music and colorful banality is projected with a central channel depicting issues of recurrence and perceptions of war as translated through internet media. The piece actually plays twice through, with the second playthrough distorting the original and creating an infinity mirror effect. The audio for Test Strips ver 1: DNA is extracted from a remix of Diana Ross’s It’s Your Move by vaporwave artist Macintosh Plus. The lyrics were rearranged to recall the ghosts of capitalism to establish a paradoxical connection to the center channel.

CAPTCHA, 2016
HD Video
single channel loop
4:06 min

Two Entities Sharing Ideologies, 2016-Present
HD Video
two channel random loop
indefinite run time

Looking for a Space, 2016
HD Video
single channel loop
7:40 min

The video offers a view of the paradoxical nature of education, social processing and conditioning through soundbites of both discontent and accepting students of this pedagogy, but also uses these processes to condition the viewer to liken to its own philosophy in an act of “self-consciousness” conditioning (in reference to artificial intelligence).

I purchased a CD online from this famous hypnotist (acquired permissions) and integrated this hypnosis with a video of a rotting corpse found on LiveLeaks mapped to an animated fractal.

A body of work amalgamating and digitally rewriting versions of U.S. presidents, landscape paintings and other media reflecting the supposed ‘American Values’ including but not limited to topics of: manifest destiny, patriotism, the Invisible Hand and other destructive ideologies. The subtext indicates the dissociation between our optical representations of the past, the fragmentation of the present and the erasure of embedded contexts of time and the dissolution of U.S. trust in the American Dream, a manufactured vision of ideals that conferred a virtual experience of success and material obtainment at the cost of others.

Travel Channel Tourist Trap Simulator [CH1 Utah], 2016
HD Video Projection
single channel loop
4:34 min

proxy, 2016
HD Video Projection, custom scent from local conifer species, diffuser
single channel loop
5:47 min

I recorded this project entirely using CRYengine. The screen castings of these interface performances was the result of a hardware failure while conducting the recording. The recording, originally set to 4K, couldn’t keep up with the drive write speed and resulted in a fractured, pixellated reproduction that ended up more interesting than the original. The overt concept initially focused on the recreation of the deteriorating process of neuron synapses.

I questioned:

How does the physical self interact with the past self?

What do we do when our memories are more electric concoctions than realtime experiences?