Parley is a data-driven sound and sculpture installation addressing the growing cultural and political divisions in the United States. The installation consists of a white flag, the international symbol of truce and negotiation, flying on a fabricated wooden flagpole with a soundscape based on the sonification of twitter mentions of the phrase “Civil War”. A wall mounted fan keeps the flag aloft and contributes white noise from which the soundscape emerges. 

The installation calls attention to our contemporary arenas of discourse as places for negotiation and sites of conflict. Social media has contributed to the increasing polarization of the country in recent years and has been a staging ground for disinformation campaigns from adversarial groups both foreign and domestic. 

Parley calls for a halt to hostilities, be they physical or rhetorical, to allow for open and thoughtful discussion across political and cultural divides, though our culture is rife with examples of the flag of truce being ignored or violated.

To create the soundscape, I collected data on the number of tweets per day that mention the phrase “Civil War” from 2016 (the beginning of Trumps term, marking a major point of division in the country) to the present (which was 2022 at the time). This gave me a data set consisting of numbers of tweets per day for six years. I also collected the text of the tweets themselves. A software synth uses the number of tweets per day as pitch values to generate the sound-scape, and selected tweets were input into a digital text reader and then recorded and mixed in. The tweets are from various contexts and partisan points of view, some regarding an actual civil war, some referring to films and books that use the term. The sound evolves over its hour and 20 minute duration, never repeating creating an audio impression of the mood in the United States at a time of political strife.

Shown in Un-Civil War at the Torrance Art Museum, 2022

Look into my eyes is an architectural installation proposal that toys with sport, competition, rivalry and the idea of sport fandom as a type of hyper-local nationalism. The installation simply removes the game field from between the spectators, leaving them to stare at each other in the absence of the spectacle of conflict and competition. New spectacles can then be woven into this frame, which can function as a site for performance, dialogue, meditation or other new types of public spectator events.

The work is currently seeking an appropriate location to be realized at.

The Intangible Crowd is a four channel, spatialized sound field.
The four speakers mounted on tripods play the sound of a large crowd, filling the area delineated by the grid with the dense chatter of a large group of people. Stepping into the space, you first hear the audio of the crowd in the speaker closest to you – as you move toward the center the channels mix and you become lost in a chaotic crowd built from layers of field recordings from various locations (some recorded locally, some sourced from the internet). The volume level is loud enough that your own conversation simply mixes into the crowd. The piece creates the feeling of being in the midst of a dense crowd - a feeling many of us have not experienced in over two years - but at the same time alone and isolated with no one in sight that could be the source. Elements of clear dialogue surface from time to time, grabbing your attention, only to be buried again in the crowd. Each speaker plays a different channel, and walking around the space allows the listened to focus in on the individual audio parts.

Shown at SoundPedro2022, Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro.

Many thanks to Michael Feldman for his assistance

Video installation, Sonoran Cone, showed at the A+D Museum in Los Angles for the LA Design festival. The exhibition, [ D / M E N S / O N S ] was produced by Dopium Los Angeles. Sonoran Cone is a video sculpture - a kaleidoscopic video mandala constructed by the intersection of Sonoran desert flora and a cone.

“…with mountains shall the discerning one learn to build! It is a small thing for the spirit to remove mountains…” - Nietzsche

A three channel sculptural video installation created for the exhibit Divergent Geometries at the José Drudis-Biada Art Gallery at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles.

Mountain is an attempt to build a mountain using methods inspired by image mapping in 3d modeling software and Google Earth’s terrain view – composited video landscapes are projected onto a faceted form, stretching the image out as it follows the shapes of the form. The video is in some places abstracted, distorted and pixilated, and in other places a clear representation of landscape.

Shown at Kristi Engle Gallery, 2011

California Pastoral at PMCA, California Design Biennial Show

Version of the California Pastoral installation created for the 2007 California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The vinyl graphic was installed on the entry doors to the show, with a video documenting the original work at United States Artists on display just inside the exhibit.

This digitally created, ASCII-like, 30' x 7' mural of vinyl text installed on a glass wall was originally commissioned by United States Artists for their offices. United States Artists is an organization created to identify and support American artists, providing around 50 fellowships yearly. California Pastoral creates a large-scale image of lush foliage out of 1/2" tall text abbreviations of the 50 states. The work provides a layer of privacy to the USA offices, as well as a dramatic backdrop to the front workspaces. The USA offices were designed by Pablo Maida Architect.

Vinyl fabricaiton and install by Warner Center Signs
Photos by Orrin Anderson

Multi-channel video installation creating peep-show like, kaleidoscopic views of the Anza-Borrego Desert, installed in a storefront in Downtown Long Beach.
This piece takes excerpts from a continuously panning video of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and provides glimpses into small parts of the image. These views are spread out, expanding the perceived size of the original video, and multiplied by virtue of being viewed through the mirror-like surface of black acrylic tubes. The view inside each tube consists of the clearly visible fragment of the landscape itself, surrounded by swirling concentric reflections that rotate and morph as the video image pans.

Installed in a storefront in Downtown Long Beach for the Phantom Galleries LA show Let There Be Light.

Photos by Orrin Anderson

Domestic Extrusion is full size sculptural mock-up of a wall system based on extruding molding shapes across the entire surface of an interior. This piece of wall was on wheels and slotted into and opening clad in the same molding, leaving nothing but a small reveal on each side to indicate the movable panel. Created for my Thesis presentation in 2003.

Frozen Fountain is a dense field of poles propsed for Glendale’s Perkins Plaza, laid out in a Fibonacci spiral (a spiral form found in nature, the pattern of sun flower seeds for one example). The poles also vary in height, creating a bowl shape in the middle of the piece. Each fiberglass pole is topped with a contrasting, light reflecting band which serves to highlight the bowl form - this creates the visual effect of a floating form amongst the thin poles, and looks like a falling pattern of water jets in a synchronized fountain.
The complex pattern of poles will provide different visual effects as the viewer walk around the installation, creating flickering patterns and visual moirés. 

The concept for Circulation Chimes is to suspend an array of wind chimes, shaped into a swelling form, from the exterior stair located in the courtyard of the Glendale Civic Center.  This project seeks to insert a striking visual and acoustic intervention into this public circulation point - creating an elegant, chandeleir-like appearance that will fill the couryard itself with the light sounds of windchimes tuned to a pentatonic scale. Visitors to the building will experience the chimes 3-dimensionally as they pass under, around, and over the installation. Movent on the stairs, as well as the wind and touching the chimes, will create layers of sounds from the array of chimes. The courtyard has fantastic acoustic properties because of the reverberative quality of concrete, and the sound from both distant traffic and the water fountain will blend with the chimes.

This site specifc project pays homage to this modern landmark, while adding a new sound and visual dimension to the building and the public space.

Site specific video installation at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. River soundtrack in the video is provided by the actual river, which is right behind the viewer. Made with the support of a residency fellowship at VSC.

A public installation in Glendale, CA, Tomorrow consists of a large street level graphic and a video monitor in an alcove. The video monitor runs a loop of several quotations offering various takes on the idea of Tomorrow - alternating optimism, pessimism and simple humor - lending different meanings to the bold yellow text along the sidewalk.

Presented by Glendale Area Temporary Exhibitions (GATE)

Installation of five 5' tall Electrical towers with five channels of audio. Basswood, CD players, Headphones, Lamp, Audio cable. 2005.
"The Hollow Men" explores conditions of miscommunication, impotence and isolation through a landscape of infrastructural lattice towers and digital audio mis-readings from T.S. Eliot's poem. "The Hollow Men" is about being in an in-between state and finding out that is has been our own inability to act, unwillingness to think self-critically that has led to this impasse. Without decisive action, without command of ourselves, we fall into the wasteland. Eliot's fear is a world ended not by the violence of a few, but through the inaction and apathy of many.

exhibitions:
solo show at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles, CA, 2005
exhibited at Stars on Vine, Aiden Riley Taylor Gallery, Hollywood, CA in 2006
exhibited at Dream Green, sideSpace, Pasadena, CA