Audio | Installation | Artifacts | Student Work
Dust Objects
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(Left-to-Right: series I, series II, Warpcube rendering, Warpcube disaster, Warpcube physical, HDR rendering, Squealix wireframe, Squealix rendering)
I see dust objects as a deep collaboration involving chance, intuition, staff from the UMBC engineering department, open software authors, and assorted hardware and software vendors—even if all parties involved are not necessarily aware of their role in the process. The result is a series of fist- to melon-sized zoomorphic sculptural objects. I used an open source low-polygon modeler to build up a series of gestures that eventually accumulate as persistent marks in 3D space via a 3D printer. Low-poly modelers are meant to create lightweight meshes for games of only a few hundred polygons, but these dust objects often have more than 250,000 facets. The objects are realized on rapid prototyping machines designed to provide industry with functional proof-of-concept models; dust objects, though, are completely useless. Part diatomaceous evolution, part fantasy, and part geometric determinism, they are the product of advanced technology that appear to have washed up on the beach.
Encanto/*blink* glove/Square-Wave Soapdish
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(Left-to-Right: Encanto 3/4 view, Encanto right side, *blink* glove, Square Wave Soapdish)
These objects all include hacked, bent, or hi-jacked circuits. Encanto is a bent and re-packaged children’s keyboard, now capable of several new and alien voices. The glove outboards switches from a wireless game controller and was used in the *blink* performance (with Movement Addiction) to allow dancers to trigger audio loops and samples. Finally, the Square-Wave Soapdish is an op-amp waveform generator in the audio range with knob for slow frequency sweeps and a photocell for more expressive sound articulation.
Listen to a short sample from the bent keyboard Encanto.
Frogger, bank 2
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(Left-to-Right: hacking the ROM, laying out the grid, painting a panel in progress, visualization of the entire bank)
Frogger, bank 2 is a large-scale painting of bitmapped graphics pulled from the 1981 arcade game, Frogger. These highly abstracted images are re-presented exactly as found by dumping the code from the game’s second read-only graphic memory bank, but at a scale of 1 pixel=1 inch. This project is possible only because tech-literate fans of the machine made the monastic gesture of exhuming and preserving the code from doomed hardware even before it was feasible, as it is now, to emulate the mid-eighties hardware that once executed the code. The painting functions as a kind of relic, a continued embodiment of code.