RESEARCH INTERESTS
Borrowing from the familiar language of advertisement, popular entertainment, and folklore, also drawing from the experiential, I investigate the cultural and social implications of technology. Technology is both a medium and a subject in my work. I use it as a metaphor for power dynamics to explore how media diversely impacts our realities. Assemblage, collage, and montage have long been central to my method of exploration and expression of ideas.
I employ hybrid assemblage when working with objects, combining household tools from different cultures with their varying counterparts. I maintain the functionality or utilitarianism of the objects so as not to render them mute. This is a way to examine the juggling acts and implications as we adapt, modify, and are modified by the implements and power systems that define our environments.
The montages and video collages apply sutured interventions. This technique involves stitching together disparate elements to create a cohesive whole and to look in between cultural products and structures to understand how media/technology influences and affects us. I bring together various images to carefully examine cultural nuances so that the work's actual meaning exists primarily between the elements brought together. My concern is not to reach definitive outcomes on the cultures involved but to look in between the cultural products and structures to better understand how media and technology influences and affects people's daily lives. I focus on the internal relationships of the individuals within the image, tempered by the surrounding power structures.
In web-based interactive media, I relinquish the role of collagist to the viewer/participant, inviting them to actively engage in the artistic process. The works provide choices of animated elements to create a collage. The provided backgrounds and elements facilitate the creation of temporary non-linear narratives that can be constructed or disrupted based on the choices made by the participant. This interactive process allows the participant to generate their own ongoing conversations, exploring these shifting factors. The process of assembling locates the actual content of the work in an interaction that is in constant flux, creating a space for combining personal perceptions with these set components to create ongoing conversations in expansive change that are fluid and resistant.
The comedy and pathos of these dialogues are one of the directions in which my work is moving. The unpredictability of our attempts to communicate is part of what makes it alive. So, I am now on the path of further opening up my work to the influence of the audience. I am attempting to make constructive peer-to-peer connections. This is a part of my ongoing journey, the core of which has been to make sure that the form I use serves the content I choose.
Similarly, extended-realities works are built with the synthesis of architecture, animatronics, and AI/AR/VR, presenting multiple locations and times virtually of the real and the imagined, trusting the viewer can hold concurrent situations. This transparent knowledge elicits empathy, fostering a sense of connection and understanding without the addiction to the commodifying algorithms of surveillance capitalism.
In a practice I call 'Real Life Connections,' I use the subject as a guide for assessing the ideas. This approach involves observing real-life situations and drawing analogies between these observations and the ideas I want to explore in my work. Observation is key, and experimentation is essential. The goal is to find analogies between the ideas and already existing materials, mechanisms, and systems in the world.
My current research is focused on using extended realities as a tool for sharing narratives in the context of installations through documentation, imaginative quests, and storytelling. As in the past, my current pursuits will serve the subsequent works. In the future, I intend to explore a space where real-life, three-dimensional artworks will be seamlessly modified by electronic media and AI. Multiple forms, multiple realities, unifying ideas.