About
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist exploring questions of embodiment, cognition, and identity through installation, performance, and interactive artwork. My approach is to identify key social structures, cultural narratives, and material realities as sites of engagement, developing them into projects that value experiential complexity over pointed, didactic statement. Past efforts have taken the form of an interactive simulation of a grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease, a suite of works exploring the fantasy of an imaginary daughter, and a bonding performance with a rifle.
In my current work, I seek to understand how our sense of self is changing with the rapid evolution of computing and media technologies. I explore the application of computer vision, language processing, and data-mining techniques to these questions—considering information processing as an approach to self-knowledge and data visualization as a mode of self-representation. Given the numerous and varied material traces we accrue in a digital world, what opportunities do new technologies afford us to understand our social connectedness, cognitive processes, and personal narratives?
As an engineer and former neuroimaging researcher, I am intimately familiar with scientific and engineering methodologies but I approach interdisciplinary work from the critical perspective of an artist—interested in particular technologies’ impact on our evolving culture, and in how technologies can be used to create new forms of expression, communication, or meaning. Ultimately, the questions of who we are and how we see ourselves are best addressed through work that integrates traditional and new forms of expression—what we call art and what we call engineering—in projects that are technically innovative while critically engaged with material and cultural traditions.
I hold an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and a BS from Yale University with majors in Biomedical Engineering (medical imaging concentration) and Art (painting concentration). I have shown work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, and the Oceanside Museum of Art, and recently presented my paper “Not Me: Collaboration and Co-production with Language Processing Systems” at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference (DAC 2009) in Irvine, California. After a few years as an adjunct professor in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD, and a researcher with the Experimental Game Lab and Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, I am now a PhD student in Digital Arts and Experimental Media at the University of Washington.