Primer Proving Ground (2017) focuses on a contraption loosely interpreted from designs printed in the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968 by the activist Stewart Brand, the catalog was intended to promote back-to-the land environmentalism and practical homesteading techniques. This humorous version of a chain pump, which would allow water to be extracted from the ground without electricity, has been constructed with ping pong balls, glass and found materials. Becoming a strange sonic device on a continual cycle, this video takes cues from current internet how-to survivalist videos.
Bugout, 2016 - performance, digital video and objects
Stemming from an interest in "prepper" culture, survivalist techniques and isolationist ideologies, this work seeks to uncover and reinterpret motives for operating outside of the system or off-the-grid. In the initial phase of this project I created devices that enabled me to interact with the landscape in speculative ways while blurring distinctions between natural and technological materials and processes. I am interested in craft as an activity that embraces experimental attitudes without losing sight of a condition that presupposes the tool or implement. Through playfully reinterpreting the ways that we orient ourselves on a daily basis, I investigate interconnected systems of observation, intuition and understanding.
"The old idea that media are environments can be flipped: environments are also media. Water, fire, sky, earth, and ether are elements - homey, sublime, dangerous, and wonderful - that sustain existence, and we still haven't figured out how to care for them; our efforts to do so constitute our technical history."
- John Durham Peters The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media