Artist Statement
As consumers and citizens, we constantly interact with technologies that contain systems and power structures hidden behind increasingly slick and automated interfaces. These systems extract data from us that is then commodified on the marketplace of information capitalism and used in algorithms that track, analyze, surveil, and monetize us without our knowledge. Favoring consumption above production, these tools also dictate and limit the way we create content, forcing us to use proprietary software, file formats, and protocols. They are embedded with racist and patriarchal biases that actively reflect the prejudices of the individuals who wrote them.
As an artist, media archaeologist, and researcher, I appropriate, hack, and crack commercial tools to find alternative uses that break their inherent restrictions and our programmed expectations. I examine and critique how these technologies and the images they transmit mediate our politics and reality. I also create, examine, and preserve technological tools that exist outside of these profit motives and oppressive structures.
My videos, open-source tools, and real-time audio/video performances undermine the interfaces and break through the algorithms of digital and analog systems, examining hidden power structures and liberating latent aesthetic materialities in cathartic and captivating compositions. I create custom software and hardware that exists outside of and actively subverts exploitative mainstream systems, and I freely distribute these tools online and in workshops that increase digital literacy and technological criticality. I incorporate an ethics of openness, distribution, and education in my instruments I create and the projects I make, and extend these philosophies into my professional practices in the classrooms and collections I teach in.