My work explores familiar cultural artifacts by subjecting them to simple and awkward digital processes that fundamentally alter our impressions. Utilizing a variety of mediums including music composition, custom software, video, digital images and multimedia installation, I expose cultural phenomena to scenarios where their meaning is evacuated; and new, unexpected meaning is found in its place. Dynamic Ascension (2009) is a hacked karaoke machine that provides an infinite stream of algorithmically generated guided meditations (ex. “The universe is expanding through continuous and abundant creative love pulses” or “You are synchronistic and collaborated when you are connected with your environment.”) Viewers in the gallery read the text into a microphone, hearing their voices amplified and reverberated against a bed of ambient music and nature sounds. Allowing the computer to assemble the jagged contents of these contemplative texts illuminates their non-linear and discretionary properties. My newest work involves brief, repeatable interactions with custom hardware or software and existing pop-culture sources. General MIDI Conductor (2009) is a Bluetooth-enabled conducting baton that allows the playback speed of a MIDI file to be controlled by tapping a conductor’s baton in the air. I Will Always Love You x 12 (2009) is a sound installation that plays a MIDI file of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” at a speed determined by the movement of viewers in the gallery, soaked in reverb to become an ambient soundscape. Chatting Music (2009) plays Steve Reich’s classic phasing piece “Clapping Music” using the Facebook chat ‘pop’ sound. By connecting the dots through irrelevant matrices of obscured meaning, I hope not to arrive at conclusions, but to produce new media that in disharmony with its own history and functionality, that understands its own lack of authenticity, and that ultimately presents us with what we already know in awkwardly poetic ways. |