FIELDGUIDE WITHIN AND AGAINST CATEGORY / A FORENSICS FOR THE MANDLEBROT ABOVE:
Greetings, explorer! You are welcome to click on any of the photos above for deeper invitation into these works. However, you’ll find the way they’re organized to shape-shift a bit, as I and my work are wont to do. Because I’m a dedicated polymath who eschews definition and blurs edges, dividing my work into discrete categories is in many ways an impossible project from the outset! These categories overlap considerably, but they’re divided here in a way that I hope is navigable and somewhat legible for the visitor here.
Under each heading you’ll find a description of my work in that area, projects that fall under it, and links across categories (as well as to other parts of the site where publications and facilitation lives). That said: if a more traditional, list-based format of my projects, background, and publications (etc) is useful for you, feel free to download my CV here. You may also wish to visit my studio / lab page at AUTONOMOUS MECHANICS for active work-in-progress, programming, and resources in development.
I’ve used ARTIST RESEARCH as a theme for my practice, but of course research and CITIZEN SCIENCE also play a central role in much of my installation work. And then again, in curatorial projects, facilitation and programs — and undergird my work in SYSTEM DESIGN, MEANING-MAKING, and even what I practice IN THE SHED! Is any part of life not creative research?I guess that’s where I land simply in asking myself what it means to be human.
I believe in a certain amount of necessary redundancy in system design, as well as in translation; when our goal is communication and clarity to a range of possible of audiences, users, and a variety of types of brains and bodies (and when we believe in a certain non-hierarchical circulation of intelligence) the goal of a website (or system) becomes different: I want you (all the yous reading this) to chart your own course here, and I want to be prismatic both for you and because I am this.
For me, creative practice across a range of media IS a sort of “disruptor mechanism,” offering the human being ways of re/orientation across their senses, and thereby introducing new intelligence to our body-mind… essentially, it’s a tool for our evolution, and by which we might help each other and our systems evolve. Hopefully, when we do so in collaboration with other non-human allies (including, btw, materials) we lead ourselves closer to the possibility of extended, sustainable, resilient life on and with this planet and its ecosystem.
Though I sometimes struggle to make the traces of my work legible / outward-facing (as I’ve traditionally prioritized the making / learning over the performance of my practice), much of my scholarship, public facilitation and in many ways content of that practice has been dedicated to troubling and exploding our understanding of documentation and dissemination as a healing mechanism, whether privately or publicly. I would encourage and invite you to read further on this, which I explore in And I in the middle-ground found: Documentation as Self-hack, Sigil, and Blueprint [download pdf].