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Papers:
 
Troiage Aesthetics. As the world around us is transformed into digitally enabled forms and processes, aesthetic strategies are necessitated that can serve to articulate the multiple layers of complexity involved. I have developed an approach to this through a number of projects that engage a formal and conceptual vocabulary derived from collage, montage and assemblage. This triple “age” (I’ll call it troiage), renders surprising zones which articulate more then just the edges of a formal transformation of culture, but reveal aspects of social structure itself. One approach to put these mechanisms of articulation into play is by looking at binary relationships such as nature/culture, personal/public, U.S./Mexico, freedom/coercion, mediation/experience. This aesthetic approach is connected to, and develops from, a number of disparate areas of art and cultural history. [ .pdf ]
 
The Scalable City. The Scalable City is a set of projects that explore the externalization of algorithmic approaches to urbanization that intersect with geographic, political, economic and aesthetic zones of conflict. Version 0.7a of the Scalable City is a multi-media exhibition consisting of various manifestations of landscape demarcation, personal embodiment and domicile transformations. Procedures governing the arrangement and operations of these discrete areas, are interchanged across domains – moving them from a more familiar basis to distorted and exaggerated extremes of patterns and juxtapositions. Through these processes, which reveal the procedural basis of the development of cultural forms, the mechanistic processes of social formation are highlighted. The forum for this version of the work is the US/Mexican border where collisions of cultural forms, political structures, economies and landscape are distinctly overt. [ .pdf ]
 
ersatz. The developments of digital technology provide opportunities for artists to radically rethink the notion of mediums as entities that are containers to be filled with the content of their artwork. Digital technologies provide the capability for artists to create their own functional mediums along with a particular artwork. However, this technological creativity can create daunting development tasks that obscure the types of creative processes that are inherently a part of many artmaking strategies. Over the past decade, the author has developed a number of large-scale, complex, public art projects that utilize such capabilities as high resolution interactive 3D graphics, multi-site networking, multi-user engagement, computer vision and haptic interfaces in novel architectural frameworks. In creating these works, the author has strived to take advantage of the best in available technological approaches, synthesized into a toolset that allows for cultural and aesthetic innovation facilitated by technological innovation. In doing so, a continuous balance between disciplined software development methodologies and the emergent processes of aesthetic discovery is negotiated. The ersatz framework of tools is a continually extensible approach that balances the opportunities created through discovery based processes and the need to create robust software frameworks to maximize resource capabilities. [ .pdf ]
 
Real Art and Virtual Reality. Virtual reality is irrupting all around us. It is coming from a number of directions: popular culture, the military, scientific visualization, entertainment systems, digital cinema, computer networking, fast computers and the economies of technological consumption. So what of art? How should artists respond to virtual reality and how are the developments of virtual reality (VR) responsive to art? [ .html ]