The Air-Loom (or Influencing Machine)
The Air-Loom (or Influencing Machine) is a response to my research on an 18th century psychotic James Tilly Mathews, who believed he was persecuted by what he called an “Air-Loom,” a pneumatic device that could influence his thoughts and world history. I’m particularly interested in his imagined machine, which marked the moment, at the turn [...]
Influenced by a Baudelaire poem Une Chargonne, this pile of raucous materiality (rabbit skin glue, fake fur, an inflating silicone bladder, organ pipes, salt, clay…) brings a particular Romantic edge to the conversation on material’s participation in culture.
H.YL.O.Z.O.I.S.M. is a collaborative research project in collaboration with Marissa Benedict that explored, among other things, Joseph Beuys, the material movement of Chicago and its history, the lifestyle of urban coyotes, diving for anaerobic microbes and much more
The first component of a large-scale kinetic sculpture/installation/performance to revitalize flabby matter. In this piece, a compressor activates hand pumps atop a veneered stand, pumping air to next component.
A TV for watching salt crystals grow. When an assistant pours salt into the funnel, it starts a 45 minute “television show” of crystals forming a lunar-like saline landscape, then collapsing into the abyss.
Delaurence Performance Investment InCorporated is a brand new publishing house and distributor of instructions sets, kits and tools for live action, small scale performance, and personal exercises. Advocating for the work of our selected contributors, we will provide the frame to experiment with the relevance and value of performance activities across our wide and varied customer base. If you are interested in a radical politics of the everyday, YOU can be involved as a participant, customer, or supplier!
Une ferme n’est pas une fantasie architectural. C’est quelque chose de semblable a un evenement naturel, quelque chose qui est comme le visage humanize de la terre. Une espece de plante geometrique aussi liee au paysage qu’un arbre ou une coline et aussi expressive de la presence humaine qu’un meuble ou qu’une machine Le Corbusier, [...]
August 28 performance event in Oakland CA
Acteon’s Wake is a bike-ride and curated performance evening of site-specific actions dealing with the theme of “our others” in outdoor and indoor social spaces between the Mission Hill and Fort Point districts of Boston. This performance evening was co-curated with Ian Colon.
The first time Daniel Philips and I visited this abandoned paper mill holding tank together, we saw a rather large fish living in it and wondered how it got there. We worked together to haul steel boxes and a metal panel over the wall of the tank to build an improvised fishing platform. With a homemade rebar fishing rod and day-glow fishing tackle shaped into graffiti tags, we gave offerings to this fish that, god or not, is clearly hardcore.
Assembly: Rehearsing a Public Ritual for the Founding of the Land of Apocryphy, was a collaboration with Sabri Reed and Jacob Reed as The LOLO Trio. We built a live interactive environment that invited theater-goers to build with provided material in a way that engaged the broader implications of our constructed world.
Sabri Reed and I codirected the Urban Anthropology Project in the spring of 2006. As organizers, we (re)introduced participants to overlooked sites in downtown Durham for creative response. This process of dialogue, documentation, and action, culminated in an exhibition and evening of events at the Transom Gallery.
At a TransAct urban retreat in 2009, I lead our small group in an activity based on a psychology concept called the ganzfeld, or “white field.” I asked, what can we learn about this place, this ganzfeld, somewhere between “sight” and “non-sight”. We walked around the ganzfeld, and performed various other activities to see what this place was like.
“Loaded Text” was a performance walk lead at the Triangle Counter-Cartography Convergence (2008) in Durham, NC with Sabri Reed. We lead participants through downtown Durham, retracing the sites, questions, and gestures of the project “Loaded Text” from 1989 by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler.
This skull was first presented as a sculpture in the Oblique Negotiations exhibition at Fivesevendelle project space in 2009. At the closing event, gallery attendees joined me to walk and decide together where to bury this skull of a person caught mid-metamorphosis between human and animal.
The Air-Loom (or Influencing Machine) is a response to my research on an 18th century psychotic James Tilly Mathews, who believed he was persecuted by what he called an “Air-Loom,” a pneumatic device that could influence his thoughts and world history. I’m particularly interested in his imagined machine, which marked the moment, at the turn of the industrial revolution, when people stopped being possessed by demons and started to be possessed by technology. This object is a piece of a larger project, which might be called a pneumatic history of culture—moments in politics, philosophy, or science when air was either remembered or repressed as a material participant in the unfolding human drama of our shared life on this air-enclosed planet.
Influenced by a Baudelaire poem Une Chargonne, this pile of raucous materiality (rabbit skin glue, fake fur, an inflating silicone bladder, organ pipes, salt, clay…) brings a particular Romantic edge to the conversation on material’s participation in culture. Baudelaire reminds us of the particular productivity of rot, of ruin, a vitality that is very different than human life yet impossible to ignore–a stinking swarming of something whole into a multitude.
This project is one component in a larger project, The Cultural History of Air, a network of sculptures that communicate to each other (and to us) through pneumatic circuitry. Below is a short video documenting my attempts to create a feedback loop between Vibrant Matter and my previous piece Pneuma. The movement of these pieces is achieved entirely through air (air piloted valves, etc.)
H.YL.O.Z.O.I.S.M. is a collaborative research project in collaboration with Marissa Benedict that explored, among other things, Joseph Beuys, the material movement of Chicago and its history, the lifestyle of urban coyotes, diving for anaerobic microbes and much more
Influenced by a Baudelaire poem Une Chargonne, this pile of raucous materiality (rabbit skin glue, fake fur, an inflating silicone bladder, organ pipes, salt, clay…) brings a particular Romantic edge to the conversation on material’s participation in culture.
Delaurence Performance Investment InCorporated is a brand new publishing house and distributor of instructions sets, kits and tools for live action, small scale performance, and personal exercises. Advocating for the work of our selected contributors, we will provide the frame to experiment with the relevance and value of performance activities across our wide and varied customer base. If you are interested in a radical politics of the everyday, YOU can be involved as a participant, customer, or supplier!
Une ferme n’est pas une fantasie architectural. C’est quelque chose de semblable a un evenement naturel, quelque chose qui est comme le visage humanize de la terre. Une espece de plante geometrique aussi liee au paysage qu’un arbre ou une coline et aussi expressive de la presence humaine qu’un meuble ou qu’une machine Le Corbusier, [...]
The first time Daniel Philips and I visited this abandoned paper mill holding tank together, we saw a rather large fish living in it and wondered how it got there. We worked together to haul steel boxes and a metal panel over the wall of the tank to build an improvised fishing platform. With a homemade rebar fishing rod and day-glow fishing tackle shaped into graffiti tags, we gave offerings to this fish that, god or not, is clearly hardcore.
Assembly: Rehearsing a Public Ritual for the Founding of the Land of Apocryphy, was a collaboration with Sabri Reed and Jacob Reed as The LOLO Trio. We built a live interactive environment that invited theater-goers to build with provided material in a way that engaged the broader implications of our constructed world.
Sabri Reed and I codirected the Urban Anthropology Project in the spring of 2006. As organizers, we (re)introduced participants to overlooked sites in downtown Durham for creative response. This process of dialogue, documentation, and action, culminated in an exhibition and evening of events at the Transom Gallery.
At a TransAct urban retreat in 2009, I lead our small group in an activity based on a psychology concept called the ganzfeld, or “white field.” I asked, what can we learn about this place, this ganzfeld, somewhere between “sight” and “non-sight”. We walked around the ganzfeld, and performed various other activities to see what this place was like.
“Loaded Text” was a performance walk lead at the Triangle Counter-Cartography Convergence (2008) in Durham, NC with Sabri Reed. We lead participants through downtown Durham, retracing the sites, questions, and gestures of the project “Loaded Text” from 1989 by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler.
This skull was first presented as a sculpture in the Oblique Negotiations exhibition at Fivesevendelle project space in 2009. At the closing event, gallery attendees joined me to walk and decide together where to bury this skull of a person caught mid-metamorphosis between human and animal.
I have been designing and prototyping an instrument I call a theoria, designed to allow small groups of people to collaboratively engage and map divine sites located within a city’s waterworks. When the instrument is completed, it will be ready for use in explorations/performances such as the one pictured.
