We make sense of the complexity of the world by categorizing it, by organizing its parts into containers, objects, and metaphors. We create tools and machines for the same reason: to bridge the gap between imagination and reality, to act upon the world, explore it, control it, and communicate within it. Ironically, as we create new and more powerful tools, we create more complexity. These elaborate machines are made of simple parts based on simple principles; it is through their combinations that many things are possible, and by examining those fundamental logical mechanisms we make more sense of the complexity about us.

DoggyCorps is a collective storytelling project that uses the animal to transcend geographic borders and political persuasions, mapping community through the voices of city dogs.

The project consists of 50+ edited oral interviews averaging 45 seconds in length and each with an accompanying hand-drawn portrait of the featured dog. I have animated 10 of the most popular stories over the course of the year, all of which can be found on the website I’ve constructed, http://doggycorps.org.

Launched in New York City, DoggyCorps will soon be on national tour, hopefully in a neighborhood near you.

Whether it be the constraining physical landscapes of our surrounding city structures, the intangible spaces in which our digital personas reside or our own internal mental constructs; we actively construct thresholds to protect intimacy. Signal in Noise explores these notions using multiple layers of transparent projection surfaces, each spaced several feet in front of the next. This structure allows the viewer to gain a sense of physical depth that is impossible with traditional film. One can perceive the narrative as a composite by standing directly in front, or dissect each element by walking between the layers.

The videos are remapped and projected onto two physical pieces, one made out of glass to evoke the ice gouge as well as the glaciers that gouge, taking on their asymmetrical form as they entropy over time into the water and often become smooth illusionistic islands on top and jagged formations on the bottom. The other piece is a sloping addition to existing walls; taking as its scale z elevation values from three dimensional, or XYZ, gridded bathymetric data. These three dimensional seabed elevation maps, (the gridded data) also use single and multi-channel seismic reflections, multibeam bathymetry, (otherwise known as methods of acoustic imaging,) and other sensor and gravity data, and are pulled together and interpolated by the scientists using geophysical data synthesis. I am sampling small and evenly spaced z elevations from this grid data, appending the elevations to a two dimensional array of latitude and longitude. I then turn the elevation points upside down into a one dimensional line in the fabrication process so that floor is the water and the top of the slope is the distance measured from it and the video travels between these points.

Many variations in the video and sound are informed by the elevation values parsed from the bathymetry grids; currently the Amundsen Sea and the Ross Sea are the main data sets for the elevations. There may also be other data included as the project comes towards completion.

The prints are part of a CD/DVD release of the Untitled Antarctica series produced by an independent media label to be announced this summer. The installation will exhibit in two venues beginning next fall.

This piece is inspired by two distinctly different sources. Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights – a triptych of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. And Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which holds that the very act of observing a particle, on the quantum level, changes its properties.