Projecting Pastness: Memory and Time

This installation consisted of a chair, some history books and a lamp to read them by. The chair included a light sensor that was hooked up to a computer running the program I wrote which would trigger a camera to photograph the subject and re-project them on the wall when they left the scene. Additionally, when no one was interacting with the installation the computer would randomly recall moments from the past and replay them – not necessarily in the proper order, and sometimes deciding midway to mix them up. the captured images would also, once recalled, deteriorate with time and pixelate into obscurity. All these effects would also create visual feedback loops and that would fragment and redefine the "memories" as time past.

Obviously, the still pictures here, taken under low light, do not display much of the actual situation at all, but they are all I have to show for now.

Wittgenstein, Language, and Simulacrum

These are the next steps in my simulacrum project listed below. In this print work, I used programming to translate some Wittgenstein quotes from Tractatus, into binary pixels in CMYK. I guess this can almost be seen as a combination of much of my previous work. to me this still seems in-progress. It is not resolved and needs to continue or be discarded. 

Memories

I never realized just how important your living or working space is. I guess I have been exceptionally lucky up until now that I have always felt good where I was and just accepted that as a given. Well, that is until I moved to my current space in NDG. 

I am not sure if it was the light, the location or the sound insulation but last year I felt inspired from morning till night and now I find myself looking for reasons to not be here and waste more time than I have wandering aimlessly downtown.

This photo I found of my ex-studio illustrates the obsessive focused passion of last year well. My current studio is so barren and empty you would swear it was abandoned. 

New Adventures in Electronics and Computers!

I am really new to electronics, programming and interfacing with the computer beyond the mouse and keyboard, but I am really excited about the possibilities for future projects. 

Here is my Arduino and a photocell I put together in order to interface using light sensing. This is pretty basic, but I got a resolution control program working with light readings. 

I am currently working this into an installation project that will deal with projections and memory. I will be done in two weeks and will, hopefully, film the interactions to display here.

Simulacrum project

Here are some works in progress from my new print series of binary/hex/grid compositions. 

The word simulacrum means: An image or representation of someone or something. (Oxford English Dictionary) But I prefer Brian Massumi's interpretation , which states:

 "A copy is made in order to stand in for its model. A simulacrum  has a different agenda, it enters different circuits."1

 and,

 "The thrust of the process is not to become an equivalent of the 'model' but to turn it and its world in order to open a new space for the simulacrum's own mad proliferation. The simulacrum affirms its own difference. It is not an implosion, but a differentiation; it is an index not of absolute proximity, but of galactic distances."2

This new series of mine, based on programing and file codes, attemps to explore the questions of copy and simulacrum by looking at the nature of an image from a digital perspective. What is an image? And when it is explored from different perspectives or encodings does its nature change? 

This is unfinished work and is still in the process of being created.

1. Massumi, Brian. "The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari" Copyright no. 1, 1997.

2. Ibid.