Eyelydian is a 360° video that uses abstraction, animated geometric patterning, and photographic images to call to mind the colors, patterns, and visions seen as light filters through closed eyelids. The virtual reality headset closes our eyes to the outside world, while paradoxically bringing us immersive vision through a set of technological “eyelids”.

Screenings:
New York Film Festival: Convergence
360 Film Festival, Paris
Light City Baltimore
Tacoma Film Festival
San Francisco Frozen Film Festival
University Film and Video Association
Milwaukee Underground Film Festival

360° digital video
3:15
2019

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In-Progress

Antennae is an upcoming interactive virtual reality experience set in a greenhouse that presents a dreamlike narrative about our vulnerability to the pervasiveness of broadcast media.

You awaken in a greenhouse. The fluorescent lights are harsh and buzzing. There are empty pots and an old watering can. You set to work watering flowerpots, but instead of flowers, television antennas and satellite dishes grow. You pick them and install them in your body. Grating, garbled audio broadcasts overwhelm you. As things build to a head, you find out what’s outside the greenhouse and what we’ve been doing with all of these antennas. 

Incubated at DevLab 2019 -- Kaleidoscope, RYOT Films, & Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund

virtual reality interactive narrative for SteamVR
in-progress, 2018-20

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Fake blood watering fake flowers. In this time when we call fake things real and real things fake, what are we growing?

This video references a nature-documentary style, shot in high-framerate slow motion. It depicts fake national flowers watered with fake blood.

Screenings:
West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival
Revolutions Per Minute Festival
Minneapolis College of Art and Design
University Film and Video Association
Portland Underground Film Festival
Montreal Underground Film Festival

Digital video
3:38
2017

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Perfect Pixels is a video sculpture series in which the Rule of Thirds intersection pixels of classic films are highlighted and magnified on four wall-mounted screens. Each installation of the series displays the perfect pixels from a film that won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography, showing the entire runtime of the film in a loop. Marked with the Rule of Thirds guidelines, the otherwise blank wall serves as the remainder of the film’s aspect ratio.
 
The Rule of Thirds is the compositional principle that divides an image into thirds vertically and horizontally. Cinematographers align subjects along those guides to create the most visually interesting composition. The points where these lines intersect are said to be the most visually powerful in the composition. Drawing this idea to its logical conclusion, the exact pixels at those points should be the most perfect pixels throughout the entire film.
 
The individual pixels are so small that you might not be able to see them blinking. But when they are magnified, they become colored flicker films, charged with the most important visual information in their original source film.

Exhibitions:
Light City Baltimore
University Film and Video Association

Video loops on four wall-mounted digital picture frames, gaffer tape
2016-18

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Space Helmet is aesthetically inspired by a 1950s B-movie view of the possible future. This sculpture features a globe turned into a space helmet, used for a performative planetary landing, and finally displayed as a television. As a child, I was certain that by my adulthood, humanity would have succeeded in landing on many of the planets and moons in our solar system. In my adulthood, economics, politics, priorities, and public interest have conspired to make that potential human achievement seem more and more like an impossible fantasy. In this video sculpture, I imagine what we might say for posterity if we were to land on another world.

Exhibitions:
Delaware Contemporary
EBC Art Center
Hood College

Globe, papier-mâché, box, antennae, plastic tubes, spray paint, plastic film, video monitor, 2 minute digital video loop
2014

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Every Feature Film on My Hard Drive, 3 Pixels Tall and Sped Up 7000% is a kind of structural, found
footage experience of media hyperavailability. It has become so easy to amass personal, virtual libraries
of cultural artifacts, and by creating this piece I was thinking about how to use that enormous wealth of
material to generate new work. I conceived of this piece as painting with films. By compressing each
movie into a stripe of color and duration, and lining them all up together in a single frame, the whole
history of my film-watching is experienced as a single painterly composition.

Screenings:
The Festival of  (In)Appropriation Tour (6 cities in the US, UK, and Canada)
CICA Museum
EBC Arts Center
University of Michigan
Antimatter [Media Art]
Videoholica
Basement Media Festival Tour (10 cities in the US and Canada)
Experimental Film Festival Portland

Digital video
3:29
2013

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Picture Frame creates is a détournement of the animated digital photo frames usually found displaying
images of family and friends. These devices occupy a wonderful “the-future-is-now” meets “sure to look
dated” cultural space, but in this work the frame itself becomes both canvas and subject. By recursively
displaying pictures of itself showing pictures of itself, the frame slowly creates a wormhole. This portal
suggests science fiction aesthetics, space travel in films from the psychedelic sixties, and minimalist film
and painting compositions. The magical-yet-kitschy nature of the object then recedes back until only the
blank frame is left once again.

Exhibitions:
Antimatter [Media Art]
Lease Agreement 

Digital images, digital picture frame
2012

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