Installations

In the following installation works, technology is the primary medium. I am interested in using technology in at least one of two ways:

Using technology to place the viewer into the role of a performer (rather than passive viewer). In this way, the meaning of the work is created based on the choices the viewer makes while interacting with the piece.
Using technology to bring the viewer’s awareness to themselves as an expanding embodiment of the senses.

The Gaze

In The Gaze, I ask viewers to “perform” intimacy. Inside of a floating booth, the viewer looks through a rectangular slit cut into a wall. Looking through this slit, one is met with their own, enlarged eyes as it is captured by a tiny camera and displayed on a monitor. One may stare into and study their digital gaze until someone else enters the second booth. At this point, the camera feeds switch, and the gaze from each booth confronts the other.

The Gaze uses technology to mediate bodies and their exchanges as a method to isolate a specific gesture (gazing) and place it into a new context with novel possibilities for play, risk, and reflection. I am interested in traveling to the divide between what characterizes a gaze as looking versus staring. I am interested in traversing the spectrum of emotional eperience that goes off in both directions from this divide. The Gaze funcitons as a feedback loop processing reactions between layers of eyes and pixels.

Using similar signifiers to sex peep shows, I also intend to address the male gaze. Looking through the slit, one assumes to be the voyeur, but instead becomes the watched. Alternatively, because of the anonymous nature of the exchanges, one can aquire the agency of looking back. The roles may then switch indefinitely between Object and Gazer.

Virtual Kissing Booth

Virtual Kissing Booth is composed of two stalls separated by a frosted shower curtain. There is a camera on each side of the frosted shower curtain, capturing the side of each participant’s face in real time video. These videos are juxtaposed onto monitors within each stall. Using one’s body as a controller, the objective of Virtual Kissing Booth is to make the videos kiss.

This piece also elicits a performance of intimacy, and calls into question the quality of intimacy as translated across physical and digital lines. One performs the digital self and enters into a web of relationships that impact the present experience. These relationships include, but are not limited to the relationships of:

Body Self <–> Digital Self,
Digital Self <–> Other Digital Self
Body Self <–> Other Body Self
Body Self [Other Digital Self <–> Other Body Self]

Especially interesting is the unique nature of each performance and the layers of meaning they contribute to the piece at large. The constantly shifting dynamic between performers creates a blooming into dimensions of intimacy, vulnerability, discomfort, enjoyment, play, seriousness, and embarrassment.

The audio is “Shower Songs of Love,” a compilation of recordings collected in response to a call for cellphone-recorded singing of love songs.

Wishing Well

Wishing Well is 8 feet tall with stair steps the viewer must climb to look down into the well. At the bottom of the well, a CRT television is playing video with sound.

The “no input” blue screen is a primary inspiration for the video, which plays on different associations as well as its imagined potential. Water is one such association. The video is a washing in and out of blue screen with minimal content. The blue also functions as a visual mantra to fixate the mind and fall into meditative states. In this way, the video acts as a visual drone with audio drone accompaniment designed by Hal Lambert. The color and sound interplay with steel walls of the well to enhance drone emersion.

Even more abstractly, I started to think of the “no input” screen as a collective point of origin for media consciousness. The blue screen is unmanifested media consciousness before it was born into the multitudes that it now exists. In this way, Wishing Well functions as a creation story.

Honey Hour Glass

This piece is an experiential gesture towards slowing down and savoring the moment at hand. The working title was “When is the Last Time You Savored Breath?”. The clock time it takes for the honey to spill completely from one side to the other is completely variable and has a lot to do with the temperature/season.

Dreaming Lines Awake

Click here for video documentation of Dreaming Lines Awake.

When the line drawn between chaos and calm is confused through ambivalent stimuli, the emotional response is peculiar. Awareness seems heightened. The emotional space is liminal. This resulting experience is the whole point of the three-part installation Dreaming Lines Awake. Videos created with a 3TrinsRGB+1 video synthesizer play throughout the space, accompanied by audio track by Ryan Renoud.

This piece is mainly about the enchantment of color spilling beneath your feet and spreading up the walls. And about nothing to do but feel and pay attention to the screens breathe or the environment cycling: materializing, dematerializing. The tiniest light portals open and close off. You will catch them if you are still and open. It’s also about the rumble of the subwoofer that rattles the light fixtures and the orange light pouring in from the back room like a lit room down the hall. Mostly it is about sitting on a bed alone in a dark chapel. With the rising and falling prominence of another sound down the hall. It is either leaking faucet or other presence or dripping rain.

Select installations within this exhibit:

Lucid Memories

Lucid Memories functioned as a pseudo collective unconscious. Anonymous voices are playing through speakers, talking about their first memories of happiness or sadness. A mobile of Mylar-mirrored-pods reflect an environment of nebulous light forms that break, swoosh in, float, and jiggle. The emotional charge of the space constantly evolves in floaty ambivalence as the accounts of happiness ache with a longing for the past, and the sad memories are alive and beautiful with raw sensorial intensity.

Reocurring Dream

A cast iron tub is made into a closed-circuit working shower that cleans and/or destroys a 30″ x 40″ hanging print. The sound of the water is heard throughout the exhibit.