I make analog machines that paint digital pictures.  A design historian by trade, the machines are often designed to make digital patterns that can be projected around a whole room, or used, like wallpaper, as a living border or immersive environment to compliment a lush interior or viewing space. My model is the Gesamtkunstwerk of early abstract art in furnished interiors, like Kandinsky's music rooms.

 

My goal is to enable a kind of activation of the embodied imagination through sight, or at least offer an optical tonic for our neurasthenic condition. The work should not assault you like a commercial or advertisement, but rather subtly creep inward, changing your pace and realigning the senses in your awareness. 

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I work with common things, like toys, domestic glassware, calculator keys and ribbons.  I choose these things based on their ability to evoke specific tactile memories; For example, the rebound of old spring-based keyboards, or the fuzzy current of sensation as a felted ribbon passes through the fingers.  By using objects we know through sight as well as touch, I seek to evoke sense memories alongside visual pleasures. 

 

The commercial objects that surround us with their controlled and controlling aesthetic affects, have played a role in unconsciously shaping aesthetic tastes and sensibilities that shift over time in a broader, more nebulous way. At the very least, I tap into these histories and their coding in material culture. At best, I want to confabulate them into a natural history of the future.  

 

My work grants the objects themselves a kind of  half-life.  The objects are actors, and they reveal their particular materiality best in motion. I often find that materiality is best staged in moments that reveal their limitations. A child learns the material limits of a toy in play,  and that is when the toy declares its status as sensory object most effectively.

 

For the Thought Forms piece, the actors include the light on the turntable above, caressing the interior of the aquarium with its finger-like shadows. One is the density gradient, with heavy warm salt water at the bottom and cool freshwater at top, which grants some control over where the clouds form and how fast they move. Then there is the mind bending Schumacher Petit feu wallpaper, whose mind bending effects are magnified as they reflect across the gradient. The dosing pumps I use to control the flow of the inks are another actor, as are the color mixtures. Each of these pulls focus in turn, and the result is an evolving digital painting.

 

My goal is to build upon that magnified materiality the camera grants to objects. I want to make a  work that reshuffles all the sensory and aesthetic associations they generate in the viewer's mind, even temporarily. 

 

 I am not a documentarian. I have no desire to evince the history of sensation with that kind of objective accuracy. I wish instead to build new futures from the past, sometimes by mis-reading it, as all great art has done. 

 

A few of these pieces are installed as single video art displays. Most I imagine as part of a decorative, synaesthetic environment.