My areas of special interest are analogue and digital storage, and the relation of systems of matter and non-matter.

I am currently developing Chemical Ghosts and The Feedback Suit, ideas that investigate the shrinking circuits of the phenomenological world.

Storage Systems

an installation at the Blue Oyster Project Space, Dunedin

The Analogue Chair

On opening night (the curly headed figure is not me!)

Below is a link to the Digital Cell Case Film that is playing in the image above

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REbhVlDModc

Digital Cell Case Film still

The show has 3 parts which represent 3 ways of storing information.
The Ceramics
(which you can't see in these photos) are scattered on the floor behind the chair and represent information stored in objects.
The Analogue Chair 
has books inside the seed pods at the end of its 'arms' and represents codex storage.
The Digital Cell Case Film 
(link above) represents the storage of information in cyberspace.
The show is interactive: visitors are encouraged to pick up and hold the ceramics, to sit in the chair and draw in the books and musicians and sound artists have been invited to compose a score for the Cell Case Film.



Studio Projects

What do you hear, what do you say?

What do you hear, what do you say?

This work is composed of 2 lumps of matter who are connected by wires running through a great tower of polystyrene. The tower is an Ethernet interface and is sucking the phenomenological juice out of the lumps. The lumps' attention is absorbed by the tower as the tower links directly to their synaptic systems. The tower is incapable of reading the physical environment around the lumps, it can only read their minds. As a result, the lumps' senses and subsidiary bodily functions wilt and calcify. The energy that was once delegated to their operation, and used to run around the body interacting with the environment, now runs in one direction, directly to the synaptic system, where it is harvested by the tower. The lumps' organic circuit of information, that composed its experience of the world, has been short-circuited. The senses and subsidiary bodily functions are now chemical ghosts.




Cultural Worms

Cultural Worms

Cultural Worms is about how culture burrows into itself and turns its back on nature. Free Market imperatives direct us to work, consume and waste. Our receptivity towards nature and our interior lives are blocked by these imperatives. The cloth covered electrical cords worm in and out of the entity’s senses to connect, remotely, with old seed husks. The entity itself also appears hollowed out and husk-like.
The central figure is homage to the Yes Men suits. The Yes Men are political, comedic tricksters who take on corporations to provoke and parody them. 

The Feedback Suit

The Feedback Suit

The Feedback Suit's Hearing Apparatus

The Feedback Suit's Taste Apparatus

The Feedback Suit is an incapacitating outfit that the wearer can barely move in. A series of senses and body functions trail haplessly around it at the end of long skinny tubes.The Feedback Suit looks at how the imperatives of the modern market system affect cycles of consumption. The drive for profit demands shorter circuits of consumption. For example, a recent development bypasses animals' expensive life cycle and makes meat in the laboratory as a kind of living corpse. Similarly, virtual technologies strive to link more directly with the brain as the executive control center and ignore the subsidiary contributions of the senses and other organic functions. Is the meat alive or dead? What will we be once we have been separated from our bodies? The suit will be shonky and handmade as a parody of the cutting edge technologies it mimics.

Monument 5, Chemical Ghosts

Calcified System



Kali 2



Pressed Goddess: Laminated Kali

IMAGE INFORMATION

The Analogue Chair
lycra, satin and velveteen
dimensions variable
Digital Cell Case Film still
polystyrene, thread and packaging waste 



What do you see, what do you hear?

polystyrene packaging waste, led light circuit, porcelain.

Cultural Worms
porcelain, electrical cord, fabric
dimensions variable



Feedback Suit

charcoal and crayon on sized tissue paper, 210 x 300mm

Hearing Apparatus
unglazed earthenware, toy car, timber 240 x 355 x 170mm
Tasting Apparatus

glazed porcelain and found object, 100 x 100 x 60mm

Monument 5, Chemical Ghosts

polystyrene, thread, packaging waste, 570 x 420 x 200mm

see at the bottom of the page at http://countingbackwardsarchives.blogspot.com/2010/07/2007.html for my previous monuments.

Calcified System
ink and acylic paint on vellum paper, 595 x 840mm
Kali 2
cardboard packaging waste and hand-stitched muslin, 480 x 880mm
Pressed Goddess: Laminated Kali
cardboard packaging waste, hand-stitched muslin and plastic, 320 x 320mm