Research & Writing
⌖ My research and curatorial interests center on art as technology — an extension of the human. My interest in technology is in its epistemological affordances through beyond the ‘tech’ sector. I often return to the historically dichotomized nature of science and art, where science is taken to interpret events through conceptual generalizations while art makes images with which we experience the nature of things. I seek to distort such dichotomy: could we understand art as the production of conceptual events that interpret generalizations?
Current Research Topics
Art as Counter-ProtocolArt as Counter-Protocol positions to delineate and disentangle the epistemologies that form our dual understanding of art and emerging technologies (AI, blockchain) and the systems in which they are emplaced. I am interested in framing political, economic and technological systems from the perspective of protological control, and how art exemplifies resistance against the very protocols they employ. I highlight artistic practices that exemplify integrated methods of research that synthesize ideas, languages and insights across various fields of knowledge and indeed, ways of knowing, including the contradictory and the dispersed. Attuned to relevant ongoings in politics and technology, Art as Counter-Protocol also prioritizes the technosphere as its working ground not only for our deepening entanglement with emerging technologies and tech companies, but also as an artifactual and analogous position to consider the interconnected economies that make up our present.
YOU ARE THE CLOCK: Perspectives on Spontaneous Composition
YOU ARE THE CLOCK is a live essay-performance produced in collaboration with Armen Nalbandian exploring spontaneous composition as a creative practice imparting poetic and novel understandings on aesthetics, collaboration, time and sound. The project will develop through various performance formats and a book, with the aim to dislocate spontaneous composition from the prevailing understanding of the practice as one based on "the now."
Excerpt — The first iteration was performed at Studio Wasabi Tokyo through a residency at Offline Ventures, Onomichi.
The Image is the TechnologyI am researching the perceptual paradox and affordances of the black hole photographs as a basis for a post-photographic grasping of AI-generated images. I began writing about this in 2019 when the first photograph of a black hole was published, tracing the genealogy of iconic ‘emplacing’ images such as NASA’s ‘Earthrise.’ Borrowing Flusser’s framework for photography whereby all images are as generative as they are analog, I propose that we would be better equipped to understand the current paradigm shift in our media ecology by locating the technology not only in the software but also in the image.
Essays
2023The Image is the Technology
⌜ In phenomenon and in composition, ‘Earthrise’ and the EHT photograph are polar opposites. One is the all-encompassing image of the world we live in, a convex mirror in which all that we know is contained; the other a picture of unknown, dense and infinite, a portrait of a space and time that even when imaged remains unimaginable. ⌟
2023Spontaneous Group Composition and Distributed Governance
⌜ Where all ideas are possible we quickly pass through multiverses of possibility; nothing is fixed and every moment is a moving part, always open to chart another course based on the whim or inclination of an individual, yet it requires the collective body to allow these inclinations to manifest, for an idea to be enhanced in synchrony at times and also at times where lines, rhythms or timbres form separately. ⌟
(co-written w/ Armen Nalbandian)
2023The Complex Relationship Between Two Simple Machines⌜ ‘Physics’ is not introduced as a conceptual overlay or metaphor here, but a counter-interpretation of improvised music as has been theorized, annexed and marketed as of the ‘jazz’ tradition. More fundamentally, improvisation is pursued as a study of interaction, technique, (dis)order, space and time. ⌟
2022The Dust of AI⌜ The very act of articulation overcomes the cartesian split: meaning and matter are enchained, a point I recall the philosopher Michael Marder made in a presentation he gave in 2020. Marder was reflecting on dust as a gateway to understanding the correlation between words and worlds... ⌟
2022Art is Technology: When the Fascination Shivers⌜ Fascination is always tinged with an aspect of incomprehensibility, the throbbing swell of an unknown substance. Even though the metaverse, blockchain, social media and AI come to mind when most of us think of technology today, the largest and deepest technological investments are still deployed for military purposes. Uncovering — and even undoing — the crypticness that beholds most of the infrastructure and tools that are held in godly regard could perhaps rewire the sorts of knowledge and literacy we have about and around technology, if we were to inch closer to seeing it as something to be understood at all. ⌟
2021What’s in a Platform?⌜ I wanted to seek out the specific language of different platforms — their intimacies, fun, materialities and ephemeralities — beyond overarching strokes of opposing theories such as the attention economy and surveillance capitalism, of course, without forgetting or diminishing the weight of those criticisms. ⌟
2021The Distance Between Smoke and Fire⌜ The image of fire may conjure the sound of explosions or wood crackling, but combustion reactions do not inherently produce sound. The exhibition’s discernible silence is felt less in the void of sensorial stimulants — a redaction already paradigmatic of conceptual art — than in the way that visitors are exacted into speechlessness by the flush of mathematical equations, symbols and numerical indicators (dates and coordinates) upon stepping into the gallery. ⌟
2019Let’s Start From the End⌜ Even though I was immersed in what urbanists call a ‘ruinscape,’ I was glancing upon a time-accented space. It is easy to think of an event such as the establishment — and the subsequent desertion — of an industrial site as an anthropogenic one. But standing in the quarries of the past, the spectacle felt less like ‘some people were here’ and more like ‘ the world was here.’ ⌟
Interviews
2022A Thousand Forms of Lifew/ Thiago Martins de Melo and Germano Dushà
2022Traversing the Conspiracy Theory Spectrumw/ Nels Frye
2021How to Work Together?w/ INTER-MISSION and formAxioms
2021See(k)ing Southeast Asian Futurismw/ Syaheedah Iskandar
2021A User Guide to Negentropic Fieldsw/ INTER-MISSION, formAxions, Andreas Schlegel, Debbie Ding, Ong Kian Peng and Zai Tang
2020EDEN: The bang. Prix Diaryw/ Christiane Peschek
202021 Questions with Hothousew/ Hothouse
2020Nakamoto the Media Magnate and Art Collector?w/ Michael Mastrototaro
2020How Do You Crypto?w/ Christopher Fussner and Krister Olsson
2020Navigating Distance, Bodies and Spaces: The bang. Prix Diaryw/ Irem Buğdaycı