Bio |
I am an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver, and the graduate director of the M.A. in Digital Media Studies. I teach courses in digital audio production, critical approaches to digital media, and digital research methodologies. I guide numerous graduate research projects.
I received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1996. Establishing cultural trends toward technoromanticism near the ends of the 19th and 20th century, my dissertation explores textual production as a method of navigating through climates of intense, cultural spectacle. The research combines literary history, pharmakopoetics, cultural studies, and media theory to parallel 19th Century drug literature and 20th century cyberpunk science fiction and the analysis of shopping malls, theme parks, and virtual reality. This work was produced under the guidance of Eric White. Before that, I studied creative writing with Ronald Sukenick and Steve Katz in CU-Boulder's M.A. program.
Since that time, I've sought to articulate a digital poetics taking shape at the intersection of multimedia production, networking technologies, media theory, literary criticism, and the history of drug culture. My net.art and audio works may be found at Electronic Book Review, Stasis_Space, DJRabbi.com, on several microsound.org compilations, and The Communications of Tomorrow label. My imaginary score to Philip K. Dick's last novel, Radio Free Albemuth, is out on the Sine Fiction label. I have participated in global webcasting projects including Open Air Radiotopia (Ars Electronica 2002) and Platoniq’s Open Radio Festival (Barcelona 2003).
Digital video work includes contributions to Randall Packer’s US Department of Art and Technology exhibits. I collaborated with Mark Amerika and Rick Silva of the DJ Rabbi collective to produce the “Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix).” The “SOS” video debuted as part of the 2004 Biennale de Paris onboard the Batofar and has since screened in New York, Bilbao, Glasgow, Eindhoven, Berlin, London, Zurich, and Seoul.
Recent publications include articles in Leonardo Music Journal & Electronic Almanac and the Contemporary Music Review. My chapter, "The Social Pulse of Telharmonics: Functions of Networked Sound and Interactive Webcasting," is included in Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture (Peter Lang Publishing, 2005).
I edit an ongoing thread at Electronic Book Review devoted to music/sound/noise and produce shows for Alt-X Audio. I curated the monthly visualsoundings series of electronic music at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (2002-3). I also founded Denver’s first digital media festival, A:D:A:P:T, in Spring 2003, and co-founded the first University of Denver Media Festival in February 2004.
Current Projects and Research |
All of my current work concerns the manner in which intelligence is distributed across contested spaces of control. To some extent, then, each of the projects below enact different episodes of this contest. The imagery and sounds encountered across these projects cast moments of conflicting intelligence across neurological, domestic, and stellar registers.
[It's a Psych-Out! | the vlog]
[microMacroCosm]
collaboration with Timothy Weaver
This new multimedia-based work of live cinema uses video and sound to explore information patterns that span cellular, neurological, global and stellar registers. Drawing on a variety of data gathered from DNA sequences, real-time biofeedback, biomolecular navigation, and interstellar radiowave activity, the performance provides an intersection for the diverse data streams that continually, largely invisibly, inform our existence. The collaborating artists mediate this connectivity as a form of improvisational influence spread across a range of data-scales.
[Radio Free Albemuth: Ambient Mind]
This media installation explores the technical tropes of ambient intelligence (AmI) design: embedded sensors, live data feeds, biofeedback monitoring, and gestural interface. As touted by the research divisions of Philips, IBM, and Microsoft, AmI will soon pervade our homes. And with neuroscience showing that electrical impulses accessed by implants can move digital cursors and execute basic commands, we face the prospect of our houses coming under the control of digitally connected thought. Unfortunately, much research presents such innovation as little more than an occasion to further our obsessions with weight, stocks, security, and instant messaging.
I want to push past the programmed mundanity of domesticated information design into the troubling and exhilirating domains of technologically expanded consciousness.
The installation situates a critique of ambient intelligence design, using high definition visual projections and three-dimensional sounds as media resources by which participants navigate fields of information derived from their own brainwaves and live astronomical data streams.
The media content of the installaion draws on public domain films (patriotic movies, drug commercials, pre-Apollo science films) to reconstruct a cultural memory, using the work of Philip K. Dick as a conceptual filter. By pitting DARPA’s blueprint for strategic paranoia against the products of hallucination, divine contact, and intergalactic communications networks, these media sources form the semiotic foundation through which a system of artificial and ambient intelligence learns to communicate.
I find that ambient intelligence design resonates with scientific, historical, and artistic accounts of the unusual states of consciousness encountered in schizophrenia and experienced under hypnosis, through pharmacology, or in lucid dreams. I’m concerned that much of the research coming out of industrial labs and computer science conferences tracks strictly technological lineages. We must consider that the impact of what Philips calls “intelligent devices that … adapt themselves to the user and even anticipate user needs” far exceeds a triad of “information, communication, and entertainment.” I seek to problematize the optimistic determinism of AmI research while pushing the technology into metaphysical terrain. The meditative, brainwave-driven work of Mariko Mori ( Dream Temple, Wave UFO) provides production models and inspiration.