The Raisin Truck Makes Raisins

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Machine Vision Self-Portraits

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Workshop presented at Processing Community Day NYC, February, 2020.

Link to conference

Presented in collaboration with Kaitlyn Chiu, Khaliya McCall, Jose Benitez and Yingna Lu, students in the New Media Art program at Baruch College, CUNY

In this workshop we developed an application in Processing that creates machine vision (MV) self- portraits. Aimed at beginners, we explored how a computer ‘sees’ in terms of shapes, colors, lines and mathematical calculations. We played with a variety of MV algorithms (eg. face and skin detection, moving-object recognition) and fiddled with parameters (eg. which colors constitute ‘skin’? what defines a face?) to generate fascinating and unpredictable results. To point the way towards future conversation about MV’s role in society, capitalism and law enforcement we discussed examples such as automated security clearance at Shanghai Airport, smile-to-pay kiosks at KFC and John Deere’s ‘See and Spray’ MV pesticide applicator.

The Community Game Development Toolkit

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Cicada Mountain

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Interactive audio-text, produced in collaboration with GPT-3 AI text generation engine

Published in The HTML Review (Spring 2023) Link to work

This poetic, absurdist narrative tells the story of a cicada, listening to a concert, hearing a plane go by, hiking up a steep mounting. The story documents the cicada's vulnerability, insecurity and dreams of anthropomorphic and spiritual grandeur. The narrative is accompanied by sound effects, which the user triggers manually as they read the story. Initially conceived as a radio play performance during the AI Radio Play workshop with Ash Eliza Smith, Jinku Kim and Robert Twomey at the Society for Language, Science and Art Conference, Purdue University, 2022. Planned as the first of 4-5 episodes of absurdist animal/insect focussed stories created in collaboration with the GPT-3 AI text generation engine.

Road Trip

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Game developed with Google Earth, audio collage

Presented at the Incurable Caravan, Car Show, 2023 (upcoming in Virginia/Online)

Player navigates Google street views from around the world as they listen to an audio work about a couple's road trip to purchase a new colony of bees.

Link to online game coming soon.

Collective Futuring in Nebraska's Panhandle

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2024, Interactive story engine, collaborative worldbuilding workshops with rural community members in Nebraska, design drawings and prompts, community funding organization
Collaboration with Ash Eliza Smith and Sam Bendix

Supported by the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center Pilot Project Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (P.I. Ash Eliza Smith)

What possibilities can worldbuilding and co-creation play in the health and well-being of rural towns where populations are often dispersed, and in which certain voices are left out of the conversation? Over the course of this project, we have been working with several rural communities in the panhandle of Nebraska, specifically with the substance use disorder (SUD) community, a cohort of middle school students and members of a non-profit agency that funds community projects. Participants have included a range of people of different ages, ethnicities, races, and mental and physical health statuses. In workshops, community members use our purpose-built, collage-based story engine to engage in world-building exercises. Participants use these exercises to collectively imagine alternate and speculative futures for themselves and their community, taking a creative approach to questions such as: What kind of public works projects might improve community health? How can we reimagine community health clinics to improve treatment for SUD? How can world-building and collective digital storytelling connect members of geographically dispersed, rural communities to support each other’s mental health?

The project makes use of a web-based platform for community-driven, collage-based world-building, a dynamic story engine that fosters the creation of innovative ideas and audio-visual narratives about collective futures of communal support. The online space not only acts as a repository for past ideas but also as a realm of possibilities for the future—where individuals can continuously contribute new ideas and stories.

Looking forward, we are currently developing the project to further support communal discourse within the story-engine. This includes collective voice-commentary, empowering participants to reflect on and respond to each other’s ideas as presented in the story-world, as well as an upvoting feature which will serve as a springboard for funding the physical realization of projects developed in world-building workshops and scenes. Workshop scenes-in-progress and prototypes

Co-Sleeping with One Breastfeeding Partner, One Non-Breastfeeding Partner, and One Newborn Baby

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2022, Graphic algorithm and performance. Produced in collaboration with Laura Morrison
Performed at Domestic Logic: Home as a site of knowledge production, event The New School / Online, and accompanying recipe book

During this event, myself, my partner and our then infant baby demonstrated an algorithm for co-sleeping with one breastfeeding partner, one non-breastfeeding partner, and one newborn baby. A 'recipe book' was published following the event, to which we contributed a graphic text version of the algorithm.

This work reflected on the formulation of this domestic task as a recipe, or algorithm -- a set of rules that are both well-defined, and in fact need to be followed to get (hopefully) through the night peacefully, but are also prone (guaranteed) to break down.

Accumulations.online

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Online Exhibition and email conversation presented in association with -empyre- new media listserve, Cornell University, November, 2020

Link to exhibition

This program features artists’ platforms, workshops and projects that explore intersections between networked collaboration, distributed storytelling and digital community building.

Works in the program experiment with new rhythms and topologies of writing, talking, listening, feeling and being together in networked environments. Works often build visual, textual or sound-based narratives through the gradual accumulation of contributions from a distributed network of participants. These projects take a broad view of networks, spanning spaces such as the digital, analog, public, private, human, non-human and geological.

At this moment of lock-down, new forms distributed community and collaboration are not only speculative, but urgently necessary. Importantly, works in the program use DIY and DIT (do it together) tool building, outside of the domain of big-tech and surveillance capitalism. They prioritize data-privacy, open source resources, security and autonomy from big-data.

DIY Scene Design and 3D Modeling

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2020, Workshop presented at Babycastles Academy

Working in Unity is hard. 3D modeling is involved, and it’s hard to be quick and nimble when you’re trying to do it (at least if you’re me). AAA-style textures are damn near impossible (and who wants to go down that road anyway). So how do you make a compelling looking 3D environment without superhero skills?

Join Daniel Lichtman in this workshop that introduces a range of “DIY” techniques in Unity to quickly make exciting, rich and layered 3D environments, no coding or specialized game-dev skills required. Lichtman will go through simple techniques for adding hand-drawn and flat, photo-based objects to your scene. He’ll demonstrate how to scan drawings and turn them into transparencies that, with a little (really only a little!) creativity, can fill your 3D space with fun, organic texture. He will also demonstrate how to take 360-degree photos with any phone, and use these as compelling, if often strange and disorienting skyboxes. Finally, he’ll show you how to fiddle with freely-available 3D models to turn them into mysterious, alluring objects to navigate in your scene.

Xzone

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September, 2020, A Do It Together platform for online community-making. Presented with Lee Tusman at the Our Networks in Uncertain Times ↔ Places

https://leetusman.com/projects/xzone/

Participants in this workshop created their own D.I.T. (“Do It Together”) 2D networked online meeting places. We introduced the idea of virtual temporary autonomous zones based on the concept of temporary autonomous zones, the socio-political tactic of creating temporary spaces to evade formal structures of control. We taught how to create a simplified networked graphical community meeting space based on this concept, including creating avatars, room interiors and interactive objects, inspired by physical spaces such as the squat, loft, community space, or campsite.

Public Access Television Within A World Systems Pattern of Understanding

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2013-14, Presented at The Woodmill GP (solo), Vox Populi, Philadelphia and Platform Arts, Belfast

Recorded at City Business Centre, London, as part of my residency at The Woodmill, London. Here I re-perform verbatim a 1998 guest-lecture given by Manhattan community television personality Harold Channer at New York University. I listen to Channer’s talk in an earphone while reproducing his text and performative style for a new audience. For the lecture slides, I show clips from the video documentation of Channer’s talk, connecting my new context with the original. Channer’s interview programme stars members from the fringes of various left-wing establishments—his biggest catch, Muammar Gaddafi. While Channer was invited to speak about community television in this presentation, he spends most of the lecture promoting his own theory about the end of economic scarcity and the limitless possibilities for free expression that will result.

Doctors and Nurses

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2017-18, BRIC Arts and Media House (solo) In Doctors and Nurses, made as part of my Media Arts Fellowship at BRIC, two performers create a tense and oddly exuberant display of different forms of personal testimony. Patient Jim (amateur actor from BRIC Public Access TV) explains what led to his upcoming heart surgery at a New York hospital. He improvises to camera, broadcasting in search of solidarity from fellow patients, reaching out to strangers who might be watching. Lara accompanies and interrupts with phrases from forgotten Rag-Time era songs that obliquely reference early American stories and social histories. They bring a combination of improvisation, scripted material and their own creative pursuits to bear in this new work that considers the fragile forms of power, solidarity and autonomy brought about by sharing your story, both online and off.

Get Straight Or Die

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2015-16, Presented at Dynamo Arts Association, Vancouver (solo)

A camera traces a man as he wanders through a park full of dogs. Partly addressing the dogs, partly himself, the man stutters through an intuitive narrative of the history of revolution and freedom in the West. Eventually, the camera drops into a pocket. When the image returns, language has been replaced by music and the dogs entertain themselves. Seen here as part of solo exhibition of the same name.

Game Time

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2018, Presented at Herculese Studio Art Program, New York

In Game Time, actor James Freeman theatrically conflates the emotional Youtube testimony of a man about to undergo major heart surgery with a semi-improvised story of his own recent cardiac procedure. A new character emerges between the two, situating the audience somewhere between a specific, visceral experience of the actor’s body and an abstract generalization of amateur online testimony. Building on my interest in amateur broadcasters and their communities, this performance work frames the online medical testimony as a space of potentially real solidarity, but an equally stark aloneness--another way to have a broken heart.

Death of Michael C. Ruppert

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2016, Presented at the Unruly Emotions conference at Oxford University

In this performance at the Unruley Emotions conference at Oxford University, I tell an improvised story of the suicide of whistleblower, underground journalist and internet radio host Michael C. Ruppert, using enlarged notes to help remember the story and a pile of denim clothing to indicate Michael's body. Here, my character and I negotiate the theatricality of emotional communication through narrative language to live and online audiences.