I look into making. And that’s traditional making practices, digital practices, and their intersections with society. So understanding what that relationship is, can be, or might be, and how they influence each other. So how making practices in society can influence the technologies that we develop, right. So I make tools, processes, technologies, etc., and really question culture, society, and design through them.
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For me, having the freedom to explore and tinker and wander to advance the plot has felt really key. And I want to acknowledge that having the capacity to allow such uncertainty and anarchism into one’s life is not a privilege that everyone has.
I guess I’m really an energy artist. So I’m just super interested in the flow of energy through all things. I find that when you look at it in terms of energy, and you think about perfume and the experience of perfume and how you construct it as energy, as frequency. Same as the frequency of the color fields in a painting. Same as the energy and the frequencies that happen in a sound circuit. Ultimately it’s all about the energy and the vibration, and I think that’s really the crux of where I focus my creativity.
Home…made, home…made. Like what does that even mean anymore? Literally everything is homemade now that we’ve been imprisoned there. Even my sister. She’s a lawyer. She’s basically practicing law in a homemade courtroom while riding an under-desk elliptical. If only an artist with a lot of foresight did their 2017 MFA thesis show about this exact topic. Oh yeah. I did that.
I think a lot of the times in my field, we see people with technical skills, traditional technical skills like computer science or electrical engineering, being comfortable sort of taking on the role of craftsperson. But at the same time we’re not very…generous with giving the term “engineer” or “technical” to people who are really from the world of craft.
It’s called Mud Frontiers for two reasons. One, because we are quite literally building with mud. And two because we’re working at the frontier of technology, using robotics and 3D printing. But also because we’re working at the historical frontier between the United States and Mexico.
While preparing my presentation I had a chance to talk with Golan, and he said that Art && Code isn’t really a venue for kinda portfolio presentations of projects. Much rather it’s an opportunity reflect on one’s work from a different angle, possibly a more personal one. And so I thought if I may spend the next twenty minutes talking to you a bit about my relationship issues. Or rather a bit of a crisis that happened about five years ago.
I think that I’ve tried to make things that expose the internals of the way that they work. And so computers are by default kind of opaque, and I think that any time a system can put a glass lid on what’s happening inside, or make it audible in some way, is one step that you can take to share and make that less of a single-person experience.
Bringing a kind of fabulation or fabulatory practice to design, I want us to try to understand design a bit differently, as a kind of multi-bounded process that starts as very small gestures and begins with doing the impossible.
I think technology, and code as a subset of technology is best thought of as a physical manifestation of our social and cultural values. So in our society, we create technology as a means to control nature and/or human relationships, and as a way to reinforce dominant power structures.