INSTALLATION | FIELD STATIONS, LIBRARIES and LABS

Future Form is a speculative agency / organization that appears repeatedly throughout my work in a variety of ways, as the “producer,” or “company” behind a variety of initiatives. The concept and distinct retro-future branding for this entity was created originally for a 3-person invited show in 2014 at Undercurrent Projects (at their then gallery in the East Village) where I was asked to interpret the idea of “books without words.” For Undercurrent, I created a sort of “trade show” style installation presented by Future Form, wherein they were showcasing “Perfect Poems by Future Form,” the slogan for which was “Language is then, Sound is Now.”

This research-driven project’s thesis imagined a visually early-sci fi inflected possibility of a future in which language can be replaced by direct sound technology, and that something like a “poem” could be produced through customized body analysis. Folders of research, a scientific poster, and overhead projector slides documented the studies / data, which relied on comparisons of sound’s movement through bodies of water with water in the human body, in particular, included energy channel diagrams from Traditional Chinese medicine, and more. Vintage sound reels were branded with the Future Form logo and tagged with data markers (ie: “SONNET ver. 0200.38.19), to suggest these are two in a series of a deep set of experiments.

Future Form was noted as the producer for the “How to Human: Disruptor Mechanism Protocol” training / one-act performance at the Performing Knowledge festival, and is credited for iterative popups and other labs. Its role can blur with that of The Operating System and Liminal Lab, and/or other nominal Organizational hyperobjects of dubious “reality.” The use of the blue and green document folders, with typewritten and numbered labeling, coded sticker use, transparencies etc. began with the Anti[thesis] project in 2008, where I began to create objects for interventions blurring the lines of ontological production.

The use of the blue and green document folders, with typewritten and numbered labeling, coded sticker use, transparencies etc. began with the [Anti]thesis project in 2008, where I began to create objects for interventions blurring the lines of ontological production. In many ways, this project marks the seed for much of what came later, including the centering of print:documentation / radical publishing with The Operating System.

Anti[thesis] was an intervention produced and performed in and around my then doctoral study at the Graduate Center of CUNY within the department of Anthropology, where I was finishing my 4th year of coursework; I was feeling deeply disillusioned with the institutional production (and control) of knowledge and language, and sought to both illustrate and speak on these topics.

Eventually compiled in a series of legal document folders, the object version of the work is a collection of texts and textual interventions, originally typed in situ in public spaces on a manual typewriter live on the Graduate Center campus. It leaves in the writer’s errors (me), in a manifesto critiquing the performed perfection and supposed, disembodied objectivity of the academic page. It offers alternative forms of meaning-making strategy, including assemblage and listing, and the use of erasure from one of my own academic papers, divided then both onto paper as a new poetics, as well as through included acetate overlays.

This strategy was submitted in lieu of traditional academic work in a variety of contexts.

My first solo gallery installation, “re/presentation,” appeared in 2000 after my proposal won a contest for the inaugural show in the new Kaori Kitao gallery opening on the Swarthmore campus. The title of the show points to the dissatisfaction I was feeling with traditional modes of representation and signals the conceptual move I was beginning to make towards an art practice imbued with the questions I was asking in my scholarly work, and into critique of both academic and creative models of value and meaning-making.

The work in the show was primarily extended experiments with analog and digital photography manipulated using the early version of photoshop I had taught myself over the summer, and transferred and translated into material interventions that spoke to ways of image making and perception: a 16 foot, full wall projection from an overhead projector offered text overlaid over landscape again over a photograph of topless blue mermaids in the Coney Island parade, sliced 4 foot high segmented prints of reflections of passengers on the Staten Island ferry were hung from in the gallery windows, a dense series of photographs printed the size of a subway poster overlaid with text is shredded and hanging from a wall, bound to a chair for the viewer; a 10 foot wall is dominated by a raw swath of burlap from which is hung a segmented digital overlay of sky photos printed onto transparency and chained to create a sheet; and so on.

In a corner of the gallery, the 1955 quote from Tadeusz Kantor, “representation loses more and more its charm,” formed into a many feet of script in ⅛’ wire, is pinned where the walls meet, to a corner of an ungessoed canvas that hangs to the floor below. Many photos of this show are on obsolete media drives.

urban interMEDIAry was my solo thesis show at Swarthmore, installed in the List Gallery in May of 2001. Already, research drove this concept: it came out of ethnographic and urban theory field work I was doing, investigating the impact of growing up in urban, suburban, or rural settings on interpersonal interactions, identity, language and perception. I was interested in particular as well in class distinction, narrative, and what was perceived vs. what remained illegible or invisible behind public facades and the resultant distortions in the conditioned observations of the Other.

This installation posed a spatial binary between the “urban,” which framed the gallery space, communicated primarily through a series of accordion artists’ books I called “house histories,” each of which was affixed to the wall with chain and s-hooks, and to each of which an aluminum door number was mounted. Behind these histories, which could be positioned opened or closed in the gallery space, was a continuous “crowd” outline, created live from the tracings of staff and students invited into the space during install. They histories were then crowned by roof gestures created with gutter grates; within each book/house the visitor found mixed media collages using found vintage and family photographs, original images and prints, drawings, risograph, fiber and other materials, collected to suggest the palimspestic layering of lives beneath any urban facade.

In the center of the gallery was the “suburban” – a raised black and white tiled wooden platform on astroturf surrounded by a picket fence, above which were hung french windows from which one could look out upon other visitors and the “city,”  and behind which one could be seen, framing the gaze. The interstitial spaces offered cuttings from local trees and plants suspended with clear wire, offering a suggestion of the ways in which the cultivated natural plays a role in these narrative formations.