Artist Statement
I like to surprise. When I lived in rural Japan a few years ago, I was almost always a little lost; I very often experienced a sort of delicious disorientation that brought me back to myself and made me mindful of even the most mundane details of everyday life. The video rental shop not far from where I lived bore the inexplicable motto Bulldog give a stimulus and room to heart—initially familiar, but then almost immediately very, very strange. This is the feeling I strive to incorporate into a practice of art. My intention is not to shock, but to unsettle—to quietly open up a space where even the objects that have slipped into the unseen through their very familiarity may become a little suspect.
My approach is suburban, provisional, and recursive. I grew up in small-town Oklahoma amidst oil fields, wheat fields, dry cleaners, and bicycle shops. I have lived most of my life in subdivisions; I am familiar with the grid.
I value processes that rely on chance, chaos, and the willful misuse of technology. Raw chance is seldom useful to me, but I find chance within constraints, or chance coupled with intuition a powerful creative engine. Technological tools under-driven, overdriven, or applied out of context have the potential to be artistically generative in ways never imagined by those who only use them as intended. In discussing Nam Jun Paik’s 1965 Magnet TV, Jon Ippolito frames artistic misuse as that which “…exploits a technology’s hidden potential in an intelligent and revelatory way.” Not confined to high technology, I am also drawn to found objects and leftovers, artifacts from other cultures, and the anomalous output from broken processes. I believe play is essential. Play that repurposes technology, especially a technology made invisible by its very ubiquity, is a vivid inspiration to me.
Bio
With a background in contemporary theory and design, Chad has recently begun exploring collisions at the intersection of art and technology. Working with sound synthesis, wireless interactivity, 3D rapid prototyping, spatialized audio and satellite imagery, Chad pursues questions of scale, translation, and mapping. Chad is an MFA candidate and RTKL fellow at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.