Computer history is inherently violent. Computers were developed as tools of war and surveillance, and only entered the private sphere when corporate interests began to comprehend the power they afforded. The personal computer revolution was nothing more than an idealistic blip; as individual machines began connecting to a vast communications network, established players in the world economy managed to once more affirm computing’s autocratic tendencies.
My practice seeks to re-center the feverish world of increasingly interconnected devices into a personal, transcendent experience with light and motion. Computers should be used as machines of hope, expanding and stimulating the viewer’s experience of light, color, and time.
In my most recent work, I engage the digital medium via a focus on abstraction, movement, and transitions. Starting with base images generated by my own custom animation framework and inspired by live-coded performance sets, I further manipulate footage with image processing tools spanning the history of visual computing. Equipment such as the Jones frame buffer, the Fairlight CVI, and modern video editors all exert an influence on the final product. The results are best experienced immersively, in a space that allows relaxation and mindful contemplation.
Computer art is not often associated with live performance. My work is improvisational and imperfect—characteristics that stem from from livecoding. My tools generate work that explores the materiality of the digital: it is not smooth and continuous, but crunchy and unsteady. My style carries an implicit critique of the positivist, perfectionist assumptions that lurk in code. Combining computer animation capabilities, frame-driven rhythms, and oversized patterns drawn from analog printing techniques, I draw parallels from previous movements with similar interests in the transcendent and the degraded: suprematism, pop art, and color field paintings. The result is an oppositional aesthetic that invites viewers to first experience and then understand a better relationship with computers.