I am a Berlin-based video artist, curator, and researcher. I received my MFA from SAIC in 2008, and a BA from Hampshire College in 2004. I have taught at Northwestern University and delivered lectures for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Residencies include Vermont Studio Center Fellowship Residency (2018); Crosstown Arts, Memphis (2018); NARS Foundation (2017); the Wassaic Project (2016) and Ox-Bow (2009). I have exhibited at KH7artspace (Aarhus), Chelsea College (London), Beverly’s New York, Kunsthalle Exnergasse (Vienna) Charim Gallery (Vienna), LW56 (Vienna), .hbc (Berlin), Brooklyn Pavillion of the Shanghai Biennial, and BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). I have received stipends for artistic research (Berlin, 2021) and project space programming (Berlin, 2019, 2020, 2022 & 2023). I am also the co-founder and co-director of Berlin-based artist-run space Horse & Pony, and founder and programmer of Xanadu, a space for artists’ moving image work.
My work uses already-existing moving image material to engage the psychological and somatic effects of video media. Repetition, looping, and composited identical elements are frequent characteristics of my work, with the aim of generating hypnotic states that are simultaneously euphoric and anxiety-ridden. My videos allow viewers to alternately become absorbed with, and have the opportunity to remove themselves from and contemplate, these potentially overwhelming perceptual and affective experiences. My work draws on the history of moving images across genre and context, and I’m attentive to the bodily, emotional, and psychological effects this work has on its viewers. Through intensive, fan-like viewing, I think through the ways historical work has prefigured contemporary circumstances, finding echoes of the present in the past, prognostications of future possibilities in meme video editing techniques, and locate moments in these source materials that unravel the easy distinction between historical phases, viewing contexts, cultural stratification, and formal strategies.
I’ve long used a variety of stroboscopic editing techniques in my work, primarily for formal purposes. These effects have a long history in artists’ moving image work, and draw on a historical narrative that starts with the nausea-inducing flickering of early film and continues on into filmic representations of brainwashing and mind manipulation. For me, they represent an opportunity to think about time, repetition, and how overwhelming and insistent perceptual environments can help us think about the mutual embeddedness of bodies, location, consciousness, and collectivity.
A big chunk of my practice is what I jokingly call consumption - reading, watching movies, aimlessly following links. This sets up a web of references and materials for me to draw on, either in the scripts for new voiceovers, or as visual source material for videos. Much of this material ends up informing Lightning Rod, an ongoing series of two-channel videos made by pointing my phone at the sunrise and sunset while rhythmically waving my hand in front of the camera, creating lo-fi stroboscopic videos. The videos respond to an anecdote from Brion Gysin, where he relays the claim that Nostradamus made his predictions while staring into the sun, waving his hand in front of his eyes to create a strobe-like effect. I try to connect the shooting days to astronomical cycles, lately shooting on solstices and equinoxes. In whatever space they’re exhibited, the videos are shown on projectors that chart a path from the exhibition location to the spot the videos were shot in: one projector points along the most direct easterly route, the other westerly. The projections are not placed on screens or walls, but are instead intended to overlap with the existing architecture of the exhibition space, falling across windows, columns, floors, walls, and ceilings. The videos are narrated by an AI-double of an exaggerated version of my own voice, speaking texts that encourage the audience to consider the edges of their own bodies, the specificity and fundamental incommunicability of their own locatedness, and imagine ways we can cross difference without trying to abolish it.
These videos have helped me articulate my most urgent current interests, which include using brute physical facts (geographical difference, the distinctness of our bodies) as figural opportunities for fantasies around communal ecstatic states and (un)real opportunities for connection and co-identification. I'm also in the middle of trying to think about how ecstatic experiences can be understood as empathetic ones, or more precisely, how the only way we can escape ourselves is through one another.