So, after flying drones all over Columbia College Chicago for 2-3 years, I actually got the chance to make a video I’m happy with.
It’s called “The Private Life of a Drone” (After Hammid and Deren) and it consists of my flying the drone around the VCCA in various locales, exploring the grounds.

More soon.
Here is the video for you.

The Private Life of a Drone

Screen Capture from my time at the VCCA

Two examples are:
“Arbeitchen” (Little Worker) – At the same time as the Mattes’ Nikeplatz installation in Berlin, Arbeitchen uses German slang to slide beneath the filters and are colored in the hues of the German flag.

“The George Bush Memorial Shoe Toss Game”
Shoes with the words “Geo” and “Bush” on the heels and made in the colors of the Iraqi flag are packaged with a bulls-eye poster with a picture of George W. Bush on it, referring to the 2008 occurrence when Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi threw his shoes at President Bush.  Now you can relive those exciting moments by taking the place of al-Zaidi by throwing your own shoes! Furthermore, the shoes passed the filters of NikeID.com.

“Child Worker”

For some time, some of my critical writing involved musings about portable devices and ubiquitous computing. With the advent of the of personal devices like PDA’s, personal GPS, pagers, and cellular phones, channels for technological artistsic expression were surely broadening.

In early 2000, I purchased a Casio WQV-1 WristCam watch on a whim, and it has become one fo my favorite tools. It is simultaneously the embodiment of technological determinism and its antithesis, as it was once the ‘next big thing’, and also a device that challenges the idea that digital art is about resolution and verisimilitude (as the WQV-1 is black and white at 100×100 pixels resolution), thus resembling older technologies such as 1980′s style personal computers.
 PROCESS

Currently, I have over 3000 images on file that were taken with the WQV. As I was experimenting with it around the first half of 2000, I noticed that I could make crude video with serial imagery, which hearkened back to a digital Muybridge sort of effect. Thus numerous sequences were assembled in Premeiere and saved as digital video.

The result was that at some point I had spliced together nearly five minutes of video, and somehow it all seemed to fit into a narrative of free association, if one were to take a page from Dulac’s process of Surrealist filmmaking.

Also, I had been looking at new media that was being created using retro-tech, and came across a series of musical pieces by The 8 Bit Construction Set, which inspired me to consider making a series of short video artworks based on the work based on music video formats used in Haymarket Riot.

In the case of these videos, a point of departure is chosen from a fairly well- known piece of postmodern theory, and then is juxtaposed with a hyperbolic narrative that I feel represents the hysterical nature of post-9/11 culture. Therefore, the fitst three videos flicker between lucidity and hallucination through a dim mirror of the pinhole digital lens of my watch camera.

Brief Synopses
8 Bits or Less (4:47, Q1 2002): An artist who has become blind (whether physically or ideologically) has resorted to viewing his world throught the prosthetic devices that constitute his sense, like cell phones, and wristcams. The result is a distored landscape that considers Sitationist theory, surveillance culture, identity, and alien abduction. Soundtrack for the youtube version is “Dollars” by Cory Arcangel.

A Wristful of Bits (4:34, Q4 2002, Featuring Holly Hughes): Our protagonist feels that he has been dependent on prosthetic sight for too long, and any distinction between the real and simulated seem blurred at best. The video contrasts a musing on reality in the digital world with a surreal story about the rise and fall of animatronic animals, and how the world was saved by performance artist Holly Hughes.

A Few Bits More: The upgrade hinted at in 8BoL has come. ALthough not immediately evident, an upgrade to color has come with slightly better resolution. However the usefulness of being upgraded is highly problematic, as it presents a series of new dilemmas.

Close Vision: (Fourth in the Trilogy) Unseen worlds observed prosthetically at close range. The camera is used at macro range, and strange abstract lanscapes are the result. Deleuze and Guattari make a brief appearance…

Zen for Bot is a series I created with a series of robot “assistants” where I continually corral them, replenish their ink, play with their barriers, and so on to create a kind of human/robot “action Painting” after Jackson Pollack.  The name also comes from a seminal Nam June Paik piece where he dragged his head like a giant calligraphy brush after dipping it in ink.  From the title, the robot is now in Paik’s place, dragging its head while I chase it.

Each robot (only one for the series shown, 3 for upcoming RGB series) has a set of basic behaviors in regards to how it responds to its general environment. As it traverses the canvas, it lays down patterns in relation to the lightness of the surface, barriers around it, and ambient light, giving it a balance between determined behavior and chance operation. However, as it operates, pens must be bled, barriers are moved, patterns change through interaction, and the result is an intricate dance between artist/operator and robot assistant/tool.

For the Man/Machine Interface: Pattern Recognition series, I picked out elements of interest and reinscribe them with Chinese red ink, making explicit the partnership between artist and tool.

One interesting point is that for MMI: Grand Mal, the robot only partially operated for half of the 10′x21′ piece, and completed the piece nearly four hours later in a sad, crawling, burnt out mass of components.

Zen for Bot: Man Machine Interface (Grand Mal)

Secret Message Society – Love @ NATO

The Secret Message Society is a project that skirts representational and transgressive borders as a series of graffitis created with UV-reactive (fluorescent) spray paint that question the world of information that surges through us everyday and the legality of messages that are not visible except under UV (black) light. This image, created from a laser-cut stencil, is an exhortation of love first placed upon a wall of McCormick Place in Chicago briefly before the 2012 NATO summit.  It issues a political challenge while lying dormant until someone with the proper means comes to find it, like a magic spell.

Dear Evil Bastards is first in the series.

Also edition of 2, 40″x30″ on Arches watercolor paper.