Without a map, a peninsula is perceived as an island 75% of the time.
My work as an artist engages questions of location, perception and meaning. How does our sense of awareness and understanding connect or disconnect through technology? The World Wide Web is an infinite laboratory for explorations on this subject. The omnipresent web provides a landscape for exploring questions of personal significance that resonate with social meanings.
Over the past twenty years I have produced artwork relating nature and technology. As I have peered into family farm corncribs and corporate biotech labs I have created art that asks central questions about a culture that is alternately leaping and staggering along in a new millennium.
The form of the work is generally a synthesis of written texts, found/sculpted objects, and the glowing screen. The written texts are a combination of simple reportage and absurdist 'scripts for performance' that metaphorically question the consequences of a disjunctive and over-engineered world. The glowing electric screen is the “Official Display Device” of the Information Age. In my installations the video images are generally stripped of the sound we expect and the result conjures a display of slightly off-balance natural phenomena. The way in which these "near natural" images fit and don't fit in the mass media context gives cause for reflection.
My recent work has developed and extended my examination of these themes. The web work is always done in conjunction with physical work, facilitating my exploration into the overlaps and edges between the virtual and the real. The gallery work has explicit and implied meanings that are then enhanced or transformed when considered through the lens of the corresponding World Wide Web location which I create for each work.
The Internet is a powerful medium in which to examine metaphors of "place", "site" and "location". In my work I often relate spatial elements of physical geography to physiological positions of the genetic markers that make up chromosomes. Relative "locations" of strings of molecules (The DNA molecules of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine) determine genetic makeup. These biological markers influence our physical and cultural presence. Social and environmental geography indicate that location is a key determinate of both culture and identity. The overlapping between these areas of study is a rich source of inspiration for my work.
As the web intends to neutralize the importance of geographic location, it has become an especially interesting 'neutral ground' from which to look at the questions of geographic, genetic and cultural 'location'. Right now the web is the proverbial map that threatens to erase the territory around us. I am exploring the flux cartography of this cultural moment.
As tremendous intrigue exists in the social, critical, and creative possibilities of the web, as well as the physical presence of work in a gallery or on a specific site, an exponential level of intrigue exists in the gap between the two. It is in this realm, in the unique interplay between the physical and the virtual, that my work engages and explores new territory.