TRITONMOBLEY

A digital drawing series spanning 18 years of documented observations and appropriated video fragments. Spliced, composited, and programmed to a distillation of close approximations.

Videos:
Urgent, Usha.
Man of Leisure
El Progresso!
A Line in Perpetuity
A Line in Four Acts
Untitled: 2001
Coupled: 3 of 4
Sadist Observations
The Future

The video production is a kaleidoscopic reduction of light that challenges both the borders of visibility and technological possibility of capturing a diminishing glow. Paired with the tonal variations created by the performers, the audience is required to readjust their senses. Listening for the near imperceptible sonic changes within the vocal arrangements, they will simultaneously be guided through a sequential array of spectacularly captured dark images from thermal imaging, 3D cameras, LiDAR scanners, and full-frame digital exposures of everyday objects, flora and fauna recorded in the dark. The live video work uses computational applications to navigate the viewing audience through the collection of recorded images across controlled micro-phases of light, distorting color perceptions of the documented objects, a speculative imaging of the light and color the bends around the event horizon, the dark zone, of black holes.

Materials: 4k animation, surround audio, open source code, variable size projection.

BARS+TONES is a redevelopment of my installations Coded #000000 [Black] and Volumetric Black. This shares a similar computational methodology—using code to reveal the en/coding of anti-blackness into digital imaging technologies. In this latest iteration the artwork offers a reimagining of the limitations of allowable hexadecimal browns in constructing digital black images by superimposing the sixteen hexadecimal brown swatches over collected images of black bodies in a futile attempt to match both digital sources using Processing. The rendered audio track is generated by passing photographic swatches of black skins through a custom Max/MSP/Jitter patch.

Volumetric Black is a research art installation in speculative design and technology. The installation’s focus takes a critical gaze at the computational inadequacies that produce misrepresentations of visual Blackness in digital media, sharpening its critique for the technological limitations of RGB spectrum to adequately produce black skin tones in digital spaces. Through a combination of programmable digital tools and electronics hacking of discarded consumer television products, Volumetric Black reimagines what the visual experience could be as it cycles through a codex of 16-hexadecimal brown light possibilities. The confluence of widely available digital tools, advancements in technology research, and the history of monetizing racial politics in the West—further problematizes the televisual presentation of Black bodies in the 21st century.

Commemoration of the postwar period of the mid-20th century when America saw the development of a US federal social program providing public funding to subsidize the expansion of private home ownership for returning white soldiers through low interest home loans. These sculptural forms, Your Land pt. i Your Land pt. ii, are presented as the hollow structures of the American dream reimagined as a “death mask” of denial—a surrogate for the Black GIs excluded from the federal program by law.

Coded #000000 [Black] is a java programmed image processor built in Processing. The code analyzes video pixels retrieving the W3C's established 16-hexadecimal browns, magnifying the pixels by appending them within the frame of the video for closer examination. The program is in its third working iteration currently analyzing a 26-minute video of prerecorded black and brown skin tones. This project is representative of a research series of interventionist works that aim to foster new conversations on the future of digital technology design, computation, and race.

Materials: 4k animation, open source code, variable size display.

The ongoing series of computational drawings works to illustrate both the indelible markings and the ever permanent monuments within our built infrastructural environments primarily through highway expansions. The complicated histories of these utilitarian systems is one of architecture’s violence—both to the land and to the citizens that are resigned to live around these sites. The looped vignettes emulate the frenetic, through their contained motion, the sense of elusive sustainability for all societal constituencies. (Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction, 122)

The video diptych applies computational glitch in rendering the trinity of faces. The programmed motion uses a randomizing algorithm to stitch pixels together across the progression of the multi-channel videos—blurring together profiled identities and sequential frame durations. The video diptych is a research continuum on the speculative reimagining of display technologies and RGB spectrum, conflating racial politics, digital mediations, and indexes of Western gaze by illuminating the subjects with the 7 of 16 available brown hexadecimal variations with a blue value below 100. This is the amalgam of a newly fabricated “digital" livery the Black man has to wear. (Fanon, 17).

Materials: Philippine mahogany, crushed velvet, reclaimed 40” flat screens, custom driver boards, 4k animation.

God Is… is an interactive installation that combines an amalgam of casino aesthetics and gambling gameplay. Consisting of four video tiles that feature sixteen photographic busts of geopolitical characters from around the world. Each video tile encodes its content with one of four global themes—Education, Geopolitics, Economies, and Conflict. The coat card pairs are comprised of ideologically aligned geopolitical characters digitally stitched together eagerly awaiting you to remake the ideologues within the global order via the press of a button.

Outside the Loop is a collection of programmed animations—operating through a series of speculative fiction episodes—each a reimagining of the creation of our spiral galaxy—with Blackness centered and [en]coded as a through line in each of the six cosmic [infra]structures. Outside the Loop uses set computational boundaries as its methodology for interpreting and constructing the reimagined visual systems—incorporating processed audio as each film exists within its distinct enclosure. The Outside the Loop project borrows its title from Mary Carbine’s indelible media studies essay on the history of cinema, exhibition cultures, and the associated infrastructures within Black American communities during the Great Migration. Outside the Loop is a rendered conflation of early 20th century cinema, southern Baptist religious spectacle, Great Migration era vaudeville theatrical productions, and the formation of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Employee of the Month Campaign “Self-Service Customer-Service” system is the latest in innovative design and technology self-checkout platforms that streamlines all of the hassle of hiring live people to do the job patrons of your establishment should be doing for free. We guarantee that the EOTM Self-Service Customer-Service system will be the employee of the month, every month.**

**give or take a few hours offline annually for routine maintenance.

This iteration of the Employee of the Month Campaign is an interventionist performance project that utilizes guerrilla tactics of donning camouflaged–capitalism, rewarding the people for a hard day’s work with complimentary silkscreened t-shirts and posters at the end of their experience.

Uninvited Invited is a collaborative performance project, with artist Yuka Otani, that confronts the contract of social space and its production. This enactment divides the public–social space into two groups. Tier one, the alienating (chosen) audience made up of members from tier two, the alienated (general) audience. At its essence, this project explores the dual function of agency.

Fractal Branch is a speculative VR illustration of neural activity during a sustained period of focused thought. The contents of the brainstorm serve as a computational self-portrait, using arbitrary data points generated from my Google keyword search history collected over a period of seven months. In this era of big data, I submit we will all have searchable digital identities, comprised of both true and false data points. Thousands of hours of digital connectivity gathered to produce cloud based composites.

A patronizing articulation that illustrates an ever growing dependence on technology. The performance stages a constructed binary between marionettes and their respective handlers, negotiating input–commands and output–actions. A choreographed sequence of movements that should ultimately result in reaching a designated location. However, input–commands are disaggregated amongst handlers, culminating in a shared experience of collective futility.