Art/Research Statement

I am a physical/media artist exploring dynamic interfaces between the body and technological systems. As an artist cultivated within a research university context, I am an artist/researcher, generating experiential knowledge in the form of vital 21st century artworks. My current art/research practice is a multi-faceted engagement with post-biological embodiment, augmented/mixed reality, 3D/stereoscopy, and immersive media composition. My repertoire of original work, generated over the past 20 years, includes performance, video, installation, interactive media, visual art, sound and electronic text.

My research utilizes a broad palette of technologies and aesthetic techniques, including:
• digital video
• 3D animation
• stereoscopy
• motion capture
• digital sound
• sensing and control systems
• generative/algorithmic programming
• telematics
• multimedia authoring for web, mobile, and gaming devices
• physical/digital choreography
• intermedia performance composition
• somatic practice and exploration of embodied knowledge

My artistic practice is rooted in modern dance and late 20th century performance. I began my career as a modern dancer with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company while concurrently pursuing my master’s degree at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). The juxtapositions embedded in this experience fascinated me, and established the framework for research and exploration that would unfold over the course of a diverse and expansive body of work. To summarize, the Hawkins Company was paramount in its pursuit of pure sensuous immediacy and live kinesthetic experience – to the extreme extent that it would never use recorded music in performance. In contrast, NYU’s ITP wrestled a dynamic rhizome of technology, code, and abstraction that torqued and contracted across a spectrum of materiality and immateriality in the birthing pangs of the digital age. My work harnesses this dichotomy, extending the spine of the sensuous, integrated Hawkins body into the expanded nervous system of digital culture and emerging post-biological framework – exploring the beauty and complexity inherent in this humanistic transformation.

Macrocosmically, my art/research practice is an exploration of 21st century mythos, informed by a convergence of perspectives from indigenous belief systems, science, engineering, humanities, and the arts. My approach to contemporary mythos is deeply inspired by the discoveries of quantum physics – specifically the interchangeability of the particle and the wave, describing the interaction between matter and energy, materiality and immateriality. In his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, quantum physicist David Bohm introduces an experiment in language he terms the rheomode, which expresses reality in terms of movement, flow, constant transformation, and nondifferentiation. Bohm posits the rheomode in contrast to our customary mode of language and perception, which reinforces the static, discrete perspective of the particle. Revealing and describing the mirror aspect of material form, the rheomode is the language of the quantum wave.

My exploration of mythos is synchronous – and often synonymous – with an exploration of the realm of the wave through the lens of the rheomode. Both are fundamental expressions of wholeness, an integrated totality, that is implicitly embodied and embedded within every molecule of our familiar, discrete, particle-bound reality. Both emerge and unfold across a dynamic dichotomy of material and immaterial form. When encountered perceptually, both offer a glimpse of the sublime – and awaken a perceptual framework that is uniquely relevant to our evolving world at this critical moment in time. My artwork articulates interfaces that open this dimension of experience.