The audio used in this work comes from an archive of recordings that were conducted by a computer program. This program listened to talk radio broadcasts across the United States from 2019-2022 and recorded what happened before, during, and after moments of silence that occurred on these broadcasts. This software generated an archive of recordings that captured the voices and ideologies of broadcasters commentating on events that happened throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This audio material was manipulated and used as the sound design for a new animation work where a boy explores a surreal world that is overrun with radio infrastructure. Many of the visual forms in the work are robotically replicated, which echoes the path toward "radio homogenization" in America that began in the 1990s with the 1996 Telecommunications Act that made radio monopolies flourish.

Screener available upon request.

The Word That Binds Them is an interactive installation that invites viewers to interact with several famous books. As viewers open the books, voices from inside each book’s pages begin speaking. These voices belong to the books’ authors and people who hold positions of power in promoting each book’s teachings. Some of these individuals include occultist Aleister Crowley, members of the 113th United States Congress, author Ayn Rand, Chairman Mao Zedong, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the Saudi Imam and Qur’an reciter Maher Al Mueaqly, Christian clergy members, and Jewish rabbis. As the voices resound from the books, they are also panned up and down five suspended loudspeakers, traversing the vertical length of the gallery. A dictionary is located in the gallery, and a touch-screen interface is embedded within its hollowed-out pages. Participants are invited to interact with the book by cycling through pages of words from within the dictionary. A participant may enter a word into the installation by pressing the ‘submit’ button. Upon submitting a word, a purple light is extinguished, all voices are silenced, and a box of fire ascends to the ceiling as a cacophony of three-hundred voices slowly swell to a climax. When the box reaches its apex, a bright amber-colored light suddenly illuminates the gallery and pages are printed in real time and rain down from above. These pages contain passages from the texts that contain both “power” and the dictionary word that the participant submitted. For example, if a participant submits "knowledge", the installations produces quotations containing both the word "power" and "knowledge".

This work began with an examination of books that have been elevated to a sacred or authoritative status by religious, political, and academic systems. After analyzing the texts through word frequency counts, and after studying these results for trends, discrepancies, and oddities, there was a single word that appeared more consistently in all the books than any other word: power. Each sentence, phrase, and quotation containing the word ‘power’ was extracted from the texts. This resulted in a collection of over 3000 excerpts. The Word That Binds Them presents these quotations anonymously, removing them from their original contexts. Without knowing the specific source of each quotation, viewers are left to consider the belief system to which each passage belongs. This anonymity may strip readers of their cultural and ideological presuppositions and forces them confront ideas from these important texts in an unusual way.

The Word That Binds Them can be installed in several different forms and configurations. In March 2020, the work was included as part of the between Gods & Dogs exhibition in Lawrence, Kansas. The books in this installation included:

The I Ching, trans. by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes
The Tanakh, trans. by the Jewish Publication Society of America
The Holy Bible, King James Version
The Holy Quran, trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali
The U. S. Constitution, 1787
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
Das Kapital, Vol. 1, Karl Marx, edited by Friedrich Engels, 1867
On the Origin of Species by Means of Nat. Sel., Charles Darwin, 1859
Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleistor Crowley, 1929
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1957
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Mao Zedong, 1964
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault, 1975

Most Retrieved Words began through engagements with the general public and by asking dog-owners the question, “What have you learned from your dog?” Participants were also asked to submit short audio clips of their dogs barking. This material was used to position dogs as valid sources of knowledge, wisdom, and power. The sounds of the dogs were manipulated to mimic the spacious reverberations of sacred architecture. In this way, the gallery takes on sacred sonic qualities and dogs take on the role of choir members. The visual content in the work contains hundreds of videos of running dogs that were extracted from found footage. These four-legged figures appear as ghostly, supernatural, and regal.

The work fits well in a branch of research known as "canine studies", and was partly inspired by the work of groups such as the Duke University Canine Cognition Center and the Bergin University of Canine Studies.

The work functions best in an immersive, multi-projection installation space. Accompanying the audiovisual material is a list of words that appeared most frequently in the general public's response to "What have you learned from your dog?" These words act as evidence that dogs can be an alternative to anthropocentric sources of belief and knowledge. The 250 most popular words from the responses to "what have you learned from your dog?" are as follows:

love, me, taught, unconditional, patience, life, time, always, no, truth, trust, people, loyalty, contain, imagine, more, know, live, enjoy, unconditionally, god, now, matter, never, family, years, better, care, good, happy, loyal, need, friend, give, humans, feel, tail, kids, patient, everything, times, came, left, compassion, home, happiness, think, going, walk, old, kind, children, play, hard, look, attention, comfort, meaning, fun, fur, small, kindness, food, gift, outside, guardians, walks, pure, responsibility, myself, worth, world, earth, above, forgiveness, amazing, peace, nature, laugh, outdoor, important, animals, acceptance, stay, greatest, keep, gave, rescue, takes, human, wrong, lost, greet, gives, hope, moments, devotion, reminder, miss, companionship, thank, rescued, want, gentle, smell, sad, eyes, beloved, house, creatures, sick, elderly, anxiety, once, passed, thought, friends, respect, lucky, scratch, long, special, head, deeply, help, sometimes, riddle, boundaries, catch, complete, days, friendship, mind, puppy, playing, wagging, running, real, ride, together, laughter, roll, eat, smart, alone, wag, wet, why, support, compassionate, free, perfect, empathy, full, unselfish, sense, relationships, adopted, past, forever, saved, working, call, calm, weather, energy, protecting, devote, exceptional, awful, sharing, follow, heaven, death, value, intuitive, legs, blessed, wonderful, health, experienced, strong, instincts, hate, hear, enthusiasm, commitment, speak, beautiful, study, hurt, scary, lesson, bones, angels, sleep, perseverance, control, minds, ourselves, dignity, age, greater, stressful, cry, relationship, end, experience, giving, companions, caring, snuggles, medication, welcome, chase, please, persistence, conversation, creature, feelings, honored, honest, tears, ability, adopt, choir, guard, surprised, teeth, annoyed, impulsively, connected, presence, celebrate, future, mouth, affection, guide, sensitivity, believing, potential, transform, independence, listening, resilience, reason, trained, focused, unconstitutional, faithfulness

A New Word presents viewers with a seemingly simple question: “What do you believe?” The work began by acquiring an empty book and filled two pages with sacred text and then erasing the text. What remained on the pages was fragments of sacred phrases and a partially erased heading: “Instruction for Believers.” This prescriptive phrase was replaced with an invitation and question: “What Do You Believe?”

Viewers respond through one of several computer interfaces, one word at a time. As each user submits a word, their word is added to a book in front of them and the books of all other users. This communal process results in an amalgam of phrases and sentences that reflect the collective beliefs of all those who participated.

Typed words are converted to speech in real time, keystrokes are translated to organ, voice, and bell sounds, and music is generated according to the responses of visitors. As participants type, each keystroke triggers melodies from celebrated Western sacred music played in retrograde and inversion. A New Word allows for individuals to express their beliefs while a highly responsive system translates their input into a complex musical orchestration that blurs the sacred and the secular. The system is highly reactive to participants’ typing, which allows individuals with little musical ability to become performers and collaborators in the work.

This interactive sculpture is a distressed cardboard box with flaps that viewers can open, peer into, and close. My first creative outlet was the guitar. Before studying music composition and art, I studied guitar performance. A severe repetitive stress injury forced me to give up the instrument. For A Voice Confined, I took one of my first guitars and subjected it to a destructive process by scorching, burning, stomping on, scraping, bending, twisting, dropping, and crushing the object. Using piezo contact microphones, I recorded the sounds of this process as heard and felt through the wooden body of the instrument. Interaction with each specific flap triggers individual sounds which resonate from within. As participants interact with the object, they layer and combine sounds of destruction as if they were playing a musical instrument.

Superior Pattern Processing is an interactive audiovisual space where visitors attempt to solve patterns. Based on their responses, the room transforms with changes in videos and sounds. When enough patterns have been solved correctly or incorrectly, the room reaches one of two climaxes: "Wakefulness" or "The Delta Wave." The work questions the "superior pattern processing" ability of humans by providing a kind of intelligence test that leaves participants questioning the impact of their choices while immersed in multiple projections, a computer network, and a clinical, cerebral soundscape emitting from a sound system placed around the perimeter of the room. Participants have a choice between attempting to solve patterns correctly or sabotaging the system by choosing obviously incorrect answers. In this way, audience members choose to either comply with or subvert the rules.

The images and sounds in the work are based on intricate and complex patterns. These sequences become so complex that, at some point, they cease to be recognized as patterns. In this way, the work questions how we perceive our complex world.

Bind is an interactive video that examines the artist-viewer relationship. As viewers approach the work, they see someone sitting across from them, perusing a large, cumbersome book. As the reader on screen moves through the pages of the book, he encounters something strange, yet familiar. Viewers discover their very own image among the pages of the book and momentarily become literary subjects.

Actual Artist Statement Generator asks viewers to submit a drawing of their own. The program analyzes their drawing and produces an artist statement based on the analysis. All of the language, vocabulary, and phrases used to generate each statement were taken from actual artist statements. The work parodies the verbose language artists sometimes use to describe their practice, but it also reveals something about the ambiguity of language itself.

A “vocal portrait” of the voice of Art Bell, a radio broadcaster who is most known for founding and hosting the paranormal overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM. The image is based on a spectrogram analysis of the late broadcaster's voice. This image was captured during his signature nightly welcome, "From the high desert, and the great American Southwest...” This work puts the human voice in the context of portraiture and draws attention to the role that voice plays in defining our self-image.

Someone Must Look is an audiovisual work that requires the presence of at least one viewer. Viewers trigger the work when they enter the room and sit in a chair. The work addresses authority figures who amass power by exclaiming others to be defective. Audience members experience a transition from being viewers to being subjects as a camera captures their face, puts them in the video, and the narrator begins to address them personally.

This work emerged from our investigation of fragile states within and beyond our own lived experiences. We wrote a series of poems and short stories, weaving the characters and ideas into a narrative that relates both to us and to something greater. The spoken words in the work were written by Aine E. Nakamura. This text was inspired by the seasonal and temporal changes experienced in a body in recovery; the poetry acts as a translation of the essential solitude in life; the dream of attaining success and the realization through everyday errands and some pauses. Nakamura, along with Claire Igawa and Christian Preski, created audiovisual material that was edited and arranged by F. C. Zuke. Through this method, we constructed a narrative comprised of our individual stories and ideas. The photographs, videos, music, and sounds used in the work were recorded by group members in Japan, the United States, and throughout their travels. The visual aspect of the story is told through a web of branches, abstracted indoor settings, and Nakamura’s performance. An eclectic soundscape of vocal, electric, and acoustic sounds paint the complexity and ambiguity of a dreamstate.

All of Me is a documentary based on artists who are also mothers. The film contains a series of interviews and discussions with artist-mothers talking about the challenges and joys of motherhood and their strategies to make parenthood compatible with their professions as artists. The film was produced at the first Artist-Parent Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado. More information about this project can be found here.

Collaboration with Waeli Wang.

“In an uptick of domestic violence during COVID-19, especially within police households, how do we keep each other safe, signal, reveal, and bring to justice the abusers? An experimental screendance working with collaborative, contemporary movement language in exploration of who we are in relationship to one another and to ourselves. How do we weave, break, let go of what is/was?”

For more information, please visit www.waeliwang.com/trammel.

Liminal Senses explores the intersection of human and machine bodies. The visual material is comprised of fragmented body parts, nature footage, and close-ups of a robot built by the artist. The sounds in the work were collected from field recordings of wind and electronic sounds discovered through disassembling electronic devices and hacking their circuit boards.

The Drink You Drink is an experimental, sound-driven, symbolic film. It is inspired by the idea that two seemingly different things may in fact be the same, and that they may each lead to the same dark end. Each section of the film may be thought of as an intensification of this idea. Visually, the film depicts various quantities of liquid that begin in a dark, small room and grow in ever- increasing ways.

Graveyard Shift is a piece inspired by the events that I experienced while working overnight at a retail store. I filmed the videos over the course of two days and then spent one week editing the video and one week writing the music. All videos were shot with a GoPro camera in Lincoln, Nebraska and in an abandoned pioneer's cemetery in western Iowa called Slates Cemetery (est. 1878).