Biography
Parsons School of Design, M.F.A
Art Academy of Cincinnati, B.F.A
Curriculum Vitae
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
I am a visual artist who produces code-based auto-generated art, live art actions, and mixed-media collage all of which examines the relentless flow of information on the Internet. The Internet is source material I appropriate, juxtapose, and remix by writing computer code that is automated and runs on a 24/7 schedule producing a form of collage I call CRUFT. The resulting artwork is haunted by images of nostalgia, climate collapse, genocide, and authoritarianism as I explore broader artistic issues such as stillness, repetition, overload, uncertainty, and loss. This work has been written about in publications such as Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann and Dysfunction and Decentralization in New Media Art and Education by Robert W. Sweeny.
The Elegy CRUFT series was created in response to our current dangerous times when virtue has become a vice, empathy has become a sin, and the concepts of truth and facts have disappeared. Each CRUFT in the Elegy series is composed as an infinite loop. The loop never arrives but keeps moving forward with a tragic desire. The meaning is fixed semantically but there is change with every iteration. Each iteration embodies our inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo as we carry on with our lives as normal and experience in real-time the collapse of large-scale systems. This work bears witness to that collapse.
Selected international and national exhibits include: Recent Thoughts on Sand Dune Cruft (After Francis Bacon), College Art Association / New Media Caucus, 2024; Re-Fest 2023 Festival organized by CultureHub at La Mama, NYC, 2023; Digital America, Issue 22, selected CRUFT and an interview published by the University of Richmond, 2023; Milton's Balm Cruft, published in the digital humanities journal The New River housed at Virginia Tech, 2021; GENERATIVE ART 2021 International Conference, Exhibition, and Live Performances, held in Sardinia, Italy, 2021; DRAWN, 7th Annual International Exhibit of Contemporary Drawing, Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2020; Generative Art FUTURING Past, an event organized by the Generative Design Lab, as a partner of @postasis Erasmus+ European Program, hosted by the Casa delle Letterature inside the Cultural Program Massenzio, Rome, Italy, 2019.
Co-founder and artistic director of the critically acclaimed theatre company, Expanded Arts, I produced and/or directed over 300 productions, including the "Free Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot" series and the "94 plays in 94 days summer festival" presented on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The successful off-broadway "Shakespeare's R&J" was first produced by Expanded Arts.
Past technical work includes over 10 years of web development, user interface design, and product management at New York City companies including About.com, Global Education Network, Beliefnet, and the branding firm of Siegel+Gale.
Currently a tenured Associate Professor of Digital Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where I have also served as the inaugural Director of the School of Media Arts. Past teaching experience includes the University of the Arts; Hartford Art School; State University of New York, Purchase College; and Dowling College, and a visiting artist at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Xavier University, and the School of Media at HSE University, (Higher School of Education) in Moscow, Russia.
