Projects
The Writing Machine
http://www.thewritingmachine.org/ is a development site hosted by the Banff New Media Institute.
The Writing Machine is a work-in-progress that will lead to an interactive installation and website. It combines meteorological sensor arrays, an interface incorporating a dynamic set of changing environmental conditions and human interaction with several real-time simulations. The primary material of The Writing Machine is an evolving stack of between 5 and 20 pages of text that are presented as orthographic projections. These texts are short personal histories and stories that individuals from around the world write in via the World Wide Web. The sequence of pages is altered according to atmospheric changes at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada and my studio in Kansas City. New pages are generated and old pages are cycled to the layers below the surface where they function as memories or repressed experiences that erupt into the top or current page and are revealed according to the weather.
The Writing Machine project makes parallels between the weather of our planet and the forces at work in relationships among individuals, communities, telecommunication, and energy systems of all kinds. This work causes one to re-evaluate technology from more inclusive historical, ecological, psychical and social perspectives that emphasize the integration of nature and culture. All non-linear, dynamical systems exhibit varieties of weather. Non-linear generative processes present us with ways of experiencing and integrating different scales of information while also incorporating real-time interactive and collaborative events in our lives and art.
I am interested in exploring a number of "machines" that exhibit concrete and formless aspects of common experience. The Writing Machine is like a garden where seeds are planted; depending on weather, gardeners, and other conditions, certain blooms will arise that reflect a history of the meteorological sites and the stories that are told.
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Interactive Projector
(PC Only) Download this projector to test out this demo of The Writing Machine in realtime. |
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Weather Station, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada Meteorological sensors measure temperature, wind velocity and direction, wind chill, rain, barometric pressure, humidity, and dewpoint. |
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Simulated Weather Instruments, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada Realtime simulation of weather data at the Banff site. |
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Quicktime Version of The Writing Machine, Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada Stack of pages at Banff site being modified by meteorological data from the site. |
The Writing Machine Pacific Ocean
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 001 The place of inscription (the ocean bottom) is revealed in a series of photographs documenting the presence of absence. The scene of writing is Long Beach, Washington, a half mile out to the far end of the western side of North Jetty at low tide, July 30, 2003, 9:00 a.m., foggy. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 002 Material energy traces invisible vortices and dynamic knots that take shape in the laminar flow of waves that just moved through the eventspace. Ocean floor exposed, becoming sandy beach close to the mouth of the Columbia River, northwestern edge of continent near the United States - Canadian border. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 003 Both the presented and unpresented traces of the visual field's temporal flux co-exist between the phase transitions of the tides. Both are present in the granularity of the atomic and molecular atmosphere of the site. There are no static forms. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 004 The turbulent bottom surface shows another temporality than the reflected surface's periodicity implies. The liquid shelves of the tidal zones at the edge of the earth are momentarily delayed and slowed down in the frozen sands. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 005 The weathered vortices of the zonal flow circulate silica, salt water, organic and inorganic particles churn, evaporate, come apart and reform at different time intervals and viscosities. The different atoms behave in independent ways ...a heterogeneous flow. Like thought folds and warps. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 006 Metal letters, word particles, float and tumble in the tides as matter, energy and mind together form a fluid dynamic of chance operations and certain knowledge. Writing is a technology that is grounded in the material flow linking our interior consciousness, thought and the sensuous physicality of the external world. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 007 Underwater alphabet's body is reorganized in the chaotic yet regular periodicity of the collapsing waves and the long-distance cosmic attraction of the moon and sun. The gravitational forces simultaneously modulate the complex tidal variations of these zones of matter, energy and temporality. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 008 Prospecting far from equilibrium, this text is still under analysis. The complexity of its heterogeneous field, its data atmosphere presents an image of negentropy ...the backflow of entropy. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 009 The photograph doesn't freeze or provide the moment. It's an instant in the gap with the material, the wave, the metal letters and the image in flux. An instant that is still wild, open, becoming, coming apart ...an image of possibility, not finalized. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 010 Letters, potential words in a medium, the ocean, salt water, our blood, words, ocean, mind ...thought. "The materialist spirit is the spirit of knowledge." J.F. Lyotard. |
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Writing Machine Pacific Ocean 011 (Moctsoon) Above: WMPO rearranges eight aluminum letters of a found alphabet: full moon May 2002, Mexico. Below: Water-energy simulation flows across evaporated salt marsh: 40mph winds March 2002, western Kansas. The two images are interlinked inversions of nature and technology. |
Thoughts Forming Matter
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Thoughts Forming Matter 001 Site of Thoughts Forming Matter in Boulder, Colorado with The Flatiron section of the Rocky Mountains in the background and Northern Italianate (Tuscan) architectural ornamentation visible on rooftops of buildings at the site. When framed this way the camera reveals a small Italian mountain village that is present, but hidden from normal view of the inhabitants of this place. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 002 Documentation of 1985 site-specific installation: Thoughts Forming Matter: 1) The Observatory (An instant in the remote future) 2) The Archive (Geometries of lost fragments) at University of Colorado Art Galleries, Boulder, Colorado. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 003 View from within the Observatory room of the installation, with individual operating an acoustically amplified joy-stick (remote control for panning, tilting and zooming) linked to a camera mounted on the roof of the galleries. The large video projection displays real time imagery, familiar, yet strange, a point of view of a world that co-exists with the everyday experience of anyone moving through that specific environment. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 004 Mining and weather were the two major metaphors of the project representing 19th and 20th century forms of technology in relation to the earth, energy and consciousness. I shot video at the Colorado School of Mines and NCAR (The National Center for Atmospheric Research). In the installation, image sequences from CSM and NCAR played on small video monitors that framed the large real time projection of the view of the world outside. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 005 This is the camera in its all-weather housing that was mounted on top of the galleries. It was remotely controlled from within the installation. I framed the scene in such a way that the camera could only take in the architectural ornamentation of the small temples and structures on top of the buildings and the mountain landscape in the background. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 006 The installation of monitors flanking the video projection in the Observatory was accompanied by two phasing sound tracks recorded during several months preceding the opening of the installation. I recorded dream sequences of students, faculty and townspeople and selected all references to passage, of moving through an environment. These narrations comprised the two soundtracks that played simultaneously and phased with each other in the installation. |
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Thoughts Forming Matter 007 Unless someone was panning or zooming the camera, a visitor might have thought that the projected image was static. Although the Flatirons were identifiable, to most people the projection appeared to be a composite, as if the image were previously recorded at an entirely different site and was not real time imagery from outside the galleries. However, birds would occasionally fly through the small temples, and the light of day would change according to the weather and time of day in the outside world. If it were snowing outside it would be snowing in the installation image as well. |
