The Whisperers
(A Work In Progress)
Synopsis:
He was an engineer, an every-man.
He believed in solving problems.
He believed in hard work.
He believed math would always provide a solution.
He believed in the law.
Then one day, he was rewarded with a promotion and given a new assignment at a top secret power plant. Very soon he found himself being forced to question everything he thought he knew about himself and the world around.
Inspired by early Soviet science fiction, The Whisperers draws upon the visual vocabulary of Surrealism and Constructivism to reinvent a classic tale of dystopia in the present.
Exhibited Then and Now Center for Book Arts, NYC 2015
Digital Nature: the Case Collection
excerpt:
December 9, 19--
I dreamed of plains of mud washed over by a river of blood. I stayed on the banks of that river, following its course. I was alone, and yet traveled among men. So scared was I that I burrowed deep into the silt and every pore in my body gasped for air.....
-from The Black Diary, Digital Nature: The Case Collection
About
“In the Case Collection, floods constantly raise the specter of total destruction, pure loss, the annihilation of meaning....”
"The Case Collection presents the debris of a colonialist narrative, and invites you to explore, map and interpret this debris. Using new media to comment on old mediums and signifying practices, the piece presents a landscape of fragmented documentation." -From "SHOTS FROM THE OBSCURE" Interview with Tal Halpern, by Patrick F. Walter, Iowa Review Web, 2003
“Accident sets in motion a whole chain of eventualities culminating in love, loss, life, death and history...”
Endgame: a Cold War Love Story
Excerpt:
(From Introduction)
“Stripling: Miss Rettinger, are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?
Rettinger: May I read my statement? ”
In 1949, The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Investigating “Communist Infiltration” in positions of influence in US society confiscated a series of film reels. The reels were identified at the work of Leonora Rettinger, a German émigré artist living in New York at the time.
On September 29th of the same year, Rettinger was summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American activities in Washington to testify regarding the content of her film work and her alleged ties to communists in Germany and the US. Her hearing took place in Washington DC from October 3 -7.
Three weeks later, Rettinger disappeared...
AbouT:
Endgame: A Cold War Love Story brings together fiction, original animation, archival film footage, and a series of interactive interfaces from a puzzle to a map to create a new type of literary work. Users must piece together their own version of events from the remains of one woman's archive. In the process, a story emerges about love, art, and exile.
Endgame: A Cold War Love Story is available in a dual English-French version with screen by screen translation.
Archiving Nature: preservation practices for the Digital Age
“Some 60 years ago, many biologists thought that bees and other insects were totally color-blind animals. I was unable to believe it.”
(From exhibition catalog):
Archiving Nature Preservation Practices for the Digital Age explores the relationship between scientific image archives and historical memory. It takes as its subject an archive of films produced from 1936 to 1976 by the Austrian Nobel Prize winning ethnologist Karl von Frisch. These films captured and recorded the moving world of the honeybee. Archiving Nature compares the record of scientific research presented in the honeybee films to the preservation practices of digitization.
Much as science seeks to capture, document, analyze, and reproduce the world to create new knowledge, historical preservation freezes, classifies and reorders the world to produce new histories. In the process, choices must be made as to what and how, to record , store and transmit information.
Archiving Nature hopes to push the situation to an extreme. It takes hours of Karl von Frisch’s experimental films and edits them down into a basic unit of analogue film – the still and the narrative. These units are then digitized and transformed into new archives which users can ‘interface’ with a s they travel backward and forward in time. In remaking Karl von Frisch’s archive in digital form, Archiving Nature hopes to explore the creative and imaginative possibilities presented by reshaping memory of the past and knowledge of the present.
CHROMOSOME 22
FROM THE LAB BENCH TO THE COMPUTER TERMINAL
An experiment in mapping the human genome
From exhibition catalog:
While Chromosome 22 was one of the first chromosomes to be fully sequenced, the fruits of this scientific discovery are only now becoming public knowledge. This project presents a set of maps to help explore the nature of biological innovation both for its mythic promise as well as threat. The work combines fact with fiction and looks to challenge and extend public engagement with the Human Genome Project.
Requires Flash plug-in
Paper Theaters For Historical projection
German Childhood 1930
April 2011, Center For Book Arts, NYC
From exhibition catalog:
In Paper Theaters for Historical Projection: German Childhood 1930, I reanimate the tradition of the German Kinder Theater, which arose in the 19th century and enjoyed popularity in the period defined by the rise of National Socialism. These theaters served as pedagogical tools for children, allowing them to stage in miniature paper cutouts sophisticated historical pageants and popular literary works.
My theaters explore the legacy of ideologies of race, blood, and nation linked to the paper dramas staged by children. In doing so, I reanimate German historic childhood, grappling with its troubled past in the present, and producing a new hybrid theater in miniature that is part print, part electronic media.
Stills and Video Documentation:
accordion books
In conjunction with the exhibition, I produced a series of limited edition double-sided accordion books expanding the narrative elements of the work with related imagery.
