(Re)tracing River restores the Missouri River’s path as drawn from historical maps made before six hydropower dams built by the Army Corps of Engineers reshaped it. Visitors are invited to create rubbings from the surface choosing either petroleum derived oil sticks or writing utensils made from the river’s soil sediment. Each rubbing is added to a blue wall, forming a collective map shaped by their choices.
The dams, built between 1933 and 1966, transformed one of North America’s most biodiverse freshwater systems. It drowned the shallow braided channels, sandbars, and seasonal flood pulses that sustained native fish populations and riparian habitat. The work implicates participants in their alignment with extractive industry or ecological repair as they retrace the river’s lost shape.
This exhibition opened in connection to Vermillion, SD’s annual River Appreciation Day, gathering hundreds of students from local elementary schools.
What values drove the production of acoustic technologies developed in the past, during times of war, that paved the way for the listening machines we live with today?
During WWI, acoustic listening devices were developed to detect the sounds of enemy aircraft engines. These machines turned listening into a militaristic act of data collection, where the meaning of the sounds were no longer important. In contrast, these reimagined versions—constructed from found materials and 3D-printed bioplastics—place curiosity about the natural world above a desire for domination over another. They are designed to tune into frequencies just outside of the human hearing range, heightening our sensitivity to the hidden processes of existence that surround us in the natural landscape.
wood, copper, plastic tubing, clear acrylic, Arduino Uno, MP3 shield, sound sensor, audio files
After Words is an interactive sound installation in which the participant’s breath causes basic units of speech to puncture the space, interrupting and overlapping yet remaining untied to any specific language. Inspired by early attempts to create speech synthesizer technologies that could only emit singular syllables, consonants, and vowels, these structures emit sounds made up of dozens of different languages.
View full artist statement here
A reimagined translation of vowel tubes modeled after Christian Kratzenstein's speech synthesis diagrams from the early 17th century. Rooted in logic, the shapes of the tubes originally reflected how the sounds of vowels bounced off the inside of one’s mouth when spoken. The new versions cite the origins of spoken language as coming from the natural world – outside of our human cavities.
2017-18
bronze, wood, bare conductive touch board, audio files
The tongue, a soft and intimate part of the body shaped to produce speech, is cast out of bronze. Viewers are invited to touch the tongues, as each is wired to a capacitive sensing circuit board. The ability of the body to hold a slight charge triggers a vowel in Spanish or English to be spoken. As these vowel sounds travel through many languages, it’s their subtle phonetic differences that are highlighted.
a pair of speakers, audio files
How does meaning fall apart when words travel across languages?
Human and artificial voices recite a list of Spanish and English false friends back and forth as if in conversation. False friends are words that sound and look alike in both languages but have different meanings. The work comes out of a conversation with my mom who is an elementary school Spanish teacher.
chalk, wood, blackboard paint
What might we learn from another tongue?
Casts of tongues are made from chalk – a natural and pedagogical material. The tongues are used as writing tools, reorienting the relationship between speech and writing. Subverting and allowing for another form of voice.
error handling vocabulary from several programming languages, audio files
2018
During my first time taking a programming class, I learned about a function that exists known as error handling. Its purpose is to anticipate, detect, and resolve application and communication errors to prevent the program from crashing. In this way, the language can never fail.
But, what does it mean if a language is not allowed to have any errors? If there is no room for misinterpretation or gaps in meaning?
In response, I've attempted to translate the coding vocabulary of error handling from these programming languages into human communication. I and another person communicate limiting ourselves to the list of 'error handling' vocabulary. We use words meant to prevent errors in a coding language to undoubtedly cause errors in another.
audio recordings from the second floor of Elsewhere Museum, scrap metal and wood, wire, speakers, and microcontroller
2018
Staircase Score transforms a functional and transitional space within the museum into an interactive sound installation composed of pieces of scrap metal and wood, reimagined as drawer-like objects.
The objects’ unique handles are an invitation to be held, mirroring the support and aesthetics of the adjacent handrail. When held, each handle plays a different sound sourced from everyday happenings on the second floor of the museum. By touching several in a row, an impromptu melody is created and new associations are possible depending on their combination.
An instructional booklet accompanies the piece, inviting visitors to edit and add to the collection of sounds as an abstract, yet poetic form of communication with future visitors. In this way, the installation might remain in constant flux, like the museum itself.
letter tiles, table, felt, projector, MaxMSP, web camera, lamp
2016
What might it mean for a group of people to shape a text together?
A table as a democratic platform for viewers to build words with tactile letter tiles. Once a word is assembled and placed on a slither of green felt, the participant pushes a button that will capture it with a photo and enter it into a database. Words are then pulled at random and placed into a text that is projected on an adjacent wall.
The words are constantly being scrambled by chance, at times forming a nonsensical text. This echoes the deconstructive and playful strategies the Dadaists implemented with language as a way to free it from meaning. The result is a collective portrait of those that participated, constantly in flux.
(Video coming soon)
air mattresses, question cards, conversation, people
collaborative project
2016-Ongoing
An ongoing series of intimate conversations between students, professors, and the general public on various sites around the Arizona State University campus to talk about sexual wellness.
Participants sit on air mattresses, as a partial nod to Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress-lugging durational performance on Columbia’s campus, but also as a metaphor for the intimacy and relative innocence of student life and sexual exploration.
The mattresses are arranged in a circle and a stack of collectively written questions are passed around, encouraging the group to open up about topics related to sexual wellness. “What does a healthy relationship look like to you?” reads one. “What was your sexual education like?” reads another. Some are more personal, “Will you tell me about your first kiss?” or “What’s one piece of sex-related advice you would give to your 15-year-old self?”
In collaboration with: Amanda Bayham, Nicholas Cagnetti, Samantha Cook, Anthony Gaito, Cydnei Mallory, Liezel Melitante, Kaela Meyer, Dressler Parsons, Malissa Posyananda, Emily Thomas, Kyra Trent, and Nataile Walker.
cardboard, table, deed cards, mail correspondence
2009-10
There were 381 foreclosures in Vermont during the month I lived there. I built the same amount of houses using cardboard, an ephemeral material. Fellow artists and writers at the Vermont Studio Center were invited to assist in construction. The houses were a little larger than monopoly game pieces.
Upon completion, all houses were put up for sale. Each had a corresponding deed card that listed the price, mortgage rate, and a statistic about foreclosures in the United States.
Viewers could purchase a house by simply removing it from the table. In doing so, they entered an agreement to mail the mortgager (me) small monthly payments of $.75 per house.
If their payments were late or not received, I forwarded foreclosure notices asking that they return their house(s).
