ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Metaphors, “word-play,” and neologisms are prominent devices within my practice as an artist and writer. I extend the function of these literary tools into an audio-visual context to discover the nuanced possibilities of time-based media using animation, digital compositing, and graphic programming environments. Especially fascinating to me are the glitches, errors, and the unexpected aberrations that sometimes disrupt the intended output of an audio-visual device.
Once studied and rehearsed, digitized and remodeled, these curious gestures of malfunction can be implemented as part of an expanded range of audio-visual expression. Over the last decade, I have developed a repertoire of digital and analog techniques, combining improvisational and orchestrated interruptions. Such techniques can help articulate deeper set cultural anxieties concerning advances in science and technology.
For the last five years I have been building a body of work entitled “Metaphortean Research.” In these works, there is a slow disclosure of malfunction and a broad range of formal intervention taking place at the level of image, text and sound. Speculative theories, technocultural discourse and scientific jargon permeate monologues and statements that are also wrought with puns, neologisms, hyperbole, and other linguistic “glitches.”
The neologized term “Metaphortean” combines “metaphor” and “Fortean,” the latter term denoting strange, mysterious events popularized in the publications of the independent early 20th century researcher Charles Fort. An eccentric champion of anomalous phenomena, Fort collected facts that had allegedly been excluded, rejected, or ignored by established science because they were unexplainable. While Fort focused on the arbitrary borderlines between accepted and denied explanations, Metaphortean Research puzzles the shifting values associated with new and obsolescent media.
Metaphors concerning supernatural and paranormal phenomena are re-wired with rhetorical devices concerning the premise of obsolescence and emergent forms of network culture. Persistent, if marginal, accounts of Bigfoot, UFOs and other Fortean events will sometimes be implicitly compared with acts of technological re-use. Alternately, ghosts and monsters may be explicitly scrutinized in terms of their own hypothetical media consumption habits.
Between disciplines and across varied media, the duration of uncertainty generated by these interventions is intended to provoke new ways of understanding one’s environment. I believe that these moments of hesitation, however temporary, can activate previously imperceptible modes of inquiry and encourage critical reflection.