Artist Statement
I could call this is a materialist abstraction, one that attempts to abstract information away from its substrate, which is to say, away from its position in cultural reference. The concrete products that these representations (or conversions) are abstracted from are always presented, and as well are the methods of their abstraction. The steps that show the conversion are completely self-evident, based on clear schemes from communications engineering. The conversion of things into data is a constant process of sorting and separation in the everyday, one that can be traced with only an optional awareness of art history. What was once a wish to escape the confinement of rational and traditional modes of representation through a sort of empiricism, even a wish for a mystical or metaphysical distance, can also be caught in the up-to-the-minute grind of the technical. I guess I’m looking for universals and essences, and today those are found in wires and circuits, which is why there is nothing liberating or inspiring about this work in the gadgeted universe. It’s realistic and despairing, and any machine, even the most primitive one from ten years ago, would understand this.

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Not much to do with the neo-modernist abstract painting trend because this isn’t painting per se, and has no use for that reference. It’s just about using paint in the landscape of post-conceptual practice where certain forms (e.g., the wall text) have been exhausted and where the idea of a gallery space as an information center has also been ransacked.

An experience of culture: imagine if Benjamin could write an essay today called, “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Repetition.” Rather than mourning the loss of the experience of the new or the original, instead it might focus on how things are processed in an era of full access and availability, how the experience of knowledge as discovery/emancipation gives way to one that feels like management/control.  Sorting and streamlining in order to navigate an ocean of data.

Art can do many things. It can reframe and present some aspect of culture that might be obscure or esoteric, and thus appear to represent it (the vampiric aspect of an art that says it represents Youtube ADD subjectivity, for example), or it can move slower and more obliquely within these spaces of technology, products, current events, subcultures, etc.  With this work there are apparently pointless yet necessary steps, a set of reasons behind the objects on the wall: mentally counting the letters and segments of a song’s chorus, mapping it out, checking for inconsistencies and errors, and then by hand drawing the diagram and filling it in with paint.

The compression of messages, normally happening in a split second, invisibly, in software, is a kind of translation necessary for electronic communication, without which no one would get anything. It happens to all the languages, and in fact language is treated simply as an object by the algorithm, not as a system. And so here there isn’t the pleasure that was maybe to be had in the days of concrete and visual poetry, which was back when erasures, blankness, and nothingness still exuded a kind of energy. If there is a semiology to get into here, it should be one about graphs and charts. The mountains of information circulated and sold by those in government, corporate business, or the military is awash with powerpoint presentations that can be as dull and incomprehensible as they are mandatory - there’s no such thing as naked data anymore, and more often than not the graphics help to fake the relevance of the content.

If one choses to believe in the increasing cybernation of society – in its growing interconnectedness, and proliferation of feedback loops – then one can perhaps say that even the New York or idea of New York as put across in this Jay-Z song is a kind of machine that patterns behaviors such as urban inspiration and ambition.

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“What number of products of products of products of products of products of products of products of products was the number of products of products of products of products of products of products of products of products?”

This statement has 2,044,900 (1,430 X 1,430) syntactically correct interpretations. I owe the citation to a footnote in one of the many books by that mad giddy futurologist, Ray Kurzweil, who is championing The Singularity, a new Terminator kind of class war where the technologically rich will be a bunch of hard drives attached to bodies. In other words, 3D Robot Party in the USA.

“Tearing down the boundaries between disciplines” is one of the many slogans adorning the new MIT Media Lab building, according to a Wall Street Journal Video report from last spring. Biomechatronics - human physical augmentation, one day artificial limbs will be better than natural limbs and people may elect to amputate in order to get that transplant. Neural and skeletal implants, things of that order. They are able to test their work on injured soldiers from the war.

While all this happened behind my back beyond my years, Iʼm not sure I wasnʼt part of the same process dropping unnamable by-processes, like smart, sustainable cities. In the 90s, I wish I could say that I was living in Amherst, MA, going to screamo shows with bands like Frankfurt School Massacre, but I was in fact submerged in a permanent fog around several layers of reincarnations of downtown New York, wearing a thriftstore 3- piece suit with a dead eye trained on anti-fashion, carrying a notebook with scribblings: Community becomes a value the more it mutates; Natural processes? History + energy, Encounter, Research, Development of projects, Ass, New playing field, Collective work, Bitch, Dialogue!

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One of my friends regards me skeptically when I try to stammer out a statement that has something to do with “art as information.” “Ok, so what?” he says, “So and so and so and so and so and so have been dealing with contemporary art in this way for years.” “They have inspired me, in this, my new direction,” I cheerfully add. But my friend won’t let me get away with it.  “And over in England, whatshisname stands alone in a crusade against the communications and knowledge management of the art market producer.” “You mean like, ‘how to win a career and influence people?’” I whine, “but I’m more interested in Shannon’s theory of information, cybernetics, compression, patterns and probabilities, sorting through the cultural apparatus, trying to know quickly what I don’t need to know.” “I could care less about all that science-techno fetish stuff,” he says finally, ending the conversation.

Imagine you are at a party and are talking to someone who is kind of hot but really outside of your realm of possibility. You endure unbearable questions. What do you do? Do you make money at that? How old are you? What kind of art do you do make?

I transcribe online news headlines about Somali pirates onto sheets of parchment paper, using a fountain pen and unpracticed calligraphy.

I copy the album cover graphics from a culture industry pop-girl-punk band and modify it in the direction of a word search game.

I redraw the fan art submitted to a Christian metalcore band’s myspace, and by leaving out one letter in my transcription, transform it into an emo eulogy for the financial markets.

I faithfully draw from a photo source a robotic hand holding a pencil.

I stick together pre-printed labels made for high school science projects…

This I read recently and it cracked me up: “In evolution, the environment processes the information presented to it in the form of organisms and produces output – some dead organisms, some live organisms.”

I also came across a press release for a group show that might have been called “Bad to the Bone.” The starting point was hardcore, the musical offshoot of punk, but I found its reasoning all wrong. It spoke of rebellion, “fuck you” art that needs to be nailed to the wall or else the kids will steal it, tattooed boys enthralling blue haired dowagers, in short, it reared the ugly head of the figure of the hipster with all it’s messy post avant-gardisms and bohemiousness.

I, too, am interested in hardcore, but as a historical institution, not as a badge or posture. Like church music in the middle ages, it is a fixed form, and those who choose to practice this form, teenagers mostly, treat it as a calling. It is a decidedly suburban form, and as we all know, hipsters abhor the suburbs while they idolize New York. The notion of underground music today is a structural deployment of information antithetical to the advanced information expertise of the advanced dreams of those living in the metropolis. ‘Advanced’ is meant here like it would in a hospital, i.e., “the illness is in an advanced or terminal stage.”

In the mid-19th century, Lord Kelvin postulated the heat death of the universe, a final or ultimate state of maximum entropy, a system “running out of steam,” based on a universal application of the second law of thermodynamics. Culturally, from Oswald Spengler to Robert Smithson, a lot of mileage has been hammered out of this concept. Something similar can be done with the notion of entropy in information theory, which evaluates the degree of unexpectedness and predictability of information in measurable terms. Rather than existential pessimism or cultural gloominess, this use of the concept of entropy spoils everyone’s expectations of the new, pushes noise and chaos back into the metaphysical; it spoils the surprise party implicit in the production of communication.

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