114 Hemiplegic Migraines

Transforming a chronic disease into a durational performance: 114 Hemiplegic Migraines documents each attack in 2024 with a photo illustration.

No Body is an Island

No Body is an Island is a virtual world created inside Animal Crossing. The piece reclaims the ‘island getaway’ central to the game as an anatomy diagram at land art scale. The player, themself a smaller version of the larger body, can climb inside their own skull, walk along their own spine, and investigate their own organs. But this isn’t the culturally privileged and idolized bodies laid out in Grey’s Anatomy. This body is broken and repaired, disabled and healing, transgender, fat and black. This is a marginalized body. But so too is the small self, the avatar which navigates the space. There is no outsider here. There is only self exploration of body/landscape.

The title, No Body is an Island, is taken from John Donne’s 1624 poem 'No Man is an Island' which begins (updated from the Olde English): “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” and ends saying “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Each texture (on the square floor tiles and stacked umbrellas that make up the body) was drawn pixel by pixel in Animal Crossing’s in-game drawing app.

Anyone can visit the piece in Animal Crossings by using the dream code: DA-2449-0971-7638.

Pastel People

Pastel People is a series of collages/drawings made with the Pastel Girls paper doll app. The app is intended for making kawaii characters and dressing them up in fun, silly, combinatorial outfits. Resisting the arrow of expectation set by the app creators BlinkPopShift discovered ways to use the interface to make portraits exploring gender, menstruation, sexual violence, and unwanted body commentary, as well as figures obscured by abstract accumulation.

MASKING MACHINE (PHOTOGRAPHY SERIES)

The Masking Machine is a still color digital photography series using machine learning to create masks of the artists face. Each image begins life as a simple selfie, the most quotidian, maligned, and rampant photography of our time. Next the images are feed into a landmark detection algorithm which finds the position of my facial features. Using this data the artist applied a layer of digital makeup, contact lenses, or glasses. Once saved the images are fed back into the landmark detection algorithm and the process begins again, over and over, building up eerie distorted masks of the artists face.

Whether working in a dark room, coaxing chemical systems like wet plate collodion or cyanotype, or working with a black box, bartering with the algorithms like landmark detection or style transfer, what is photography if not scientifically processed image-making through a machine? And when done recursively, feeding the same image through that process again and again the machine itself also becomes visible in the images. Like repeatedly taking a pinhole photo of a pinhole photo until nothing remains but the artifacts of the photographic process itself made visible. Our time is caked with filtered images, enlarged eyes, and whitened teeth, all enabled by nearly invisible photographic algorithms. If we are to live with them we also need to recognize and understand them and Masking Machine is here to make them seen.

Update: Masking Machine was printed and debuted at the 2020 show Recoding CripTech at SOMArts.

Keepers

This pair of small drawings, each only 21 by 14 cm, is a touch screen finger painting made using Keep, a list and reminder app from Google. Transgender faces kept like secret charms between my grocery lists and unemployment reminders.

Cubist Selfies

Cubist Selfies are a photography series made on a smart phone. Each image contains 3 views of the artist face from the same day combining multiple spatial viewpoints in order to seam together a fragmented experience of self.

Rocks in my mouth

2014

Rock in my mouth is a series GIFs. Each is a selfie with an animated revolving polygon inside the artists open mouth. Their soft insides made hard like rock candy armor. The images are vulnerably aggressive and revealingly hidden.