ARTIST'S STATEMENT
In my work, the electronic is used to try and understand how we relate to complex organisms, such as a flock of birds, a domesticated pet, or specifically in this case small digital machines. The machines that make up the work are similar to any number of electronic things in our everyday lives. These things are constantly involved in an internal programmatic decision making process that shape the way we live but that we never directly experience. At what point do these small machines gain their own agency and how we can attempt to rationalize the mechanistic with the natural?

Edsger Dijkstra, a pioneer in the field of computer science, wrote in one of his perennial essays that, "the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." I propose that Dijkstra was not arguing for the idea that computers can actually think, because that is a futile argument, but rather is questioning our social tendencies to ascribe totemic traits found in the animal world onto the machines around us. We have all, for example, at one time or another, felt that our computers have had a personal grudge against us.

This unconscious ascription relates to how much of the activity of a human brain is occupied with and rather enjoys finding patterns in the things it perceives. That is why we often see faces in the grain of wood or bother with crossword puzzles. From a young age our brains are capable of distinguishing one face from many others. As a social species, it is an underlying survival trait to be able to distinguish friend from foe by determining a creature’s mood with only very limited information. Likewise, our brains can sometimes even perceive mood or other similar attributes in otherwise inanimate things.

My work strives to find that point when there is just enough movement, light, or other physical manifestation that its behavior can become seemingly recognizable. The challenge is that if the brain is given too little information it will become bored by what it sees and if given too much the brain will only see noise and also becomes bored. Because of this, there is a small margin where a machine can assume pseudo-naturalistic traits. This transubstantiation is similar to the way a falling leaf, seen out of the corner of your eye, appears like something under its own agency, alive and flying. When we come to find ourselves empathizing with a machine we can begin to have a discussion about just how pervasive the mechanical has become in the age of the iPod, when ubiquitous computing is everyday and even refrigerators have WiFi.

For the viewer to begin to make these associative connections, the work needs to be generative, or systems based. In part it relies on the systems of randomness and noise to create pattern. I program the work to have a certain amount of predictability and add randomness into the code to depreciate authorial control. While not as prescribed as John Cage’s work based on the I Ching, many aspects of my work are left to chance during its construction and presentation: the weight or angle of the arms, how the work moves against its hangers, the presence of nearby work or nearby viewers, and so on. These traits compound to a certain level of unpredictability. The combined result is not just coded behaviors, but also physical behaviors as well. In the end, the work is successful when, from this chaotic system, a perceivable pattern emerges.

-2007