Commissioned by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc. for the Amazon.com building at 207 Boren Avenue North in Seattle, as part of the revitalization campaign for the South Lake Union neighborhood which includes many public artworks. My portion of the Periscope installation is an autonomously generated video, changing daily, which is composed of surveillance and webcam images gathered from around the world.

Security Blanket is a ‘video quilt’ whose dynamically-generated pattern is formed out of hijacked surveillance camera feeds. The project juxtaposes references to the American quilting tradition, associated with images of early Americana and notions of ‘traditional American values,’ with modern hi-tech tools of paranoid social control.

In the process, it foregrounds an obsessive attention to the unobserved minutiae of everyday human experience while posing questions about contemporary American values.

Does an atmosphere of hyper-vigilance and loss of privacy actually make us more secure?

Inspired by traditional quilt patterns and the impending end of analog broadcast TV, this generative piece is based on a software algorithm that autonomously remixes the video stream.

In this installation live broadcast TV programs on 11 televisions are continuously remixed into a rhythmic, stroboscopic composition. It functions automatically, cycling among preprogrammed patterns, yet with a strong element of indeterminacy due to the unpredictable content.

This piece manifests the attraction/ repulsion relationship I have with TV. It provides a hyper-stimulating barrage of fast-paced images and sounds, yet frustrates attempts to actually ‘watch’ it in a conventional sense.

Created as the culmination of my MFA in Art & Technology, this electronic installation is run by a MAX/MSP/Jitter patch that both outputs video samples and talks to a PIC microcontroller. The PIC is programmed in C with my rhythmic pattern algorithms and controls custom video switching electronics.

Duet for Alto and Tenor Televisions is a performance piece using an electronic video/music instrument of my own design. In the improvised performance, tiny snippets of historical found footage are obsessively re-examined and remixed into a live sonic and visual collage. Shifting loops intensify the grain of the voice and image, the micro-gestures of the filmed subjects, and the rhythms that fall into and out of phase as the material is dynamically recombined.

The analog synth-inspired instrument consists of a custom hardware controller interface containing a usb joystick control board wired to a variety of knobs and button banks, as well as a pair of mini lcd screens and digital-analog video scan converters. The interface is connected to a Max/MSP/Jitter software application I built, which contains video and audio sampling, triggering, and effects modules.

My first piece that linked musical gesture to video processing.
Programmed in Max/MSP/Jitter, this piece is conceived as a dialogue between myself as musical performer and the dancing figures contained in the video material. The visual qualities of the video playback are controlled by the sounds generated by my bass, and my playing is in turn influenced by the randomly-generated combinations of video clips, video filters, and audio loops.

When I started my graduate studies at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002 I built the first version of my video sampler. This was something I’d been dreaming about for years, and at the time it was a major accomplishment for me to be able to make it myself. ‘Ethel’ was one of my early experiments using the video sampler. Make sure to follow the bouncing ball and sing along!