Artist Statement
Twills is a generative video work, dynamic and mostly text-based. It was projected on the wall in the show and explores the roles of medication in contemporary life and the complex responses people have to these. I harvested twitter for several months in 2013 looking for interesting tweets containing the words pills or medication and built a database of over 500 tweets. Then I wrote a program to assemble random collections of tweets into structured collages of these many different hopes, fears, problems, solutions and experiences of medication. People are remarkably candid on twitter and their tweets are thought-provoking in themselves, but when they are combined in unexpected ways, new stories are continually generated.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Artist Statement
Postcard from Tunis is not an objective documentary (if such a thing actually exists). Instead, it's a playful, artistic exploration of writing: its histories, its inscriptions, its relationships with pictures and its relevance to the human-computer interface. This is set in a very personal, audiovisual portrait of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. This is a city and culture that I love, and the home of my former family-in-law. I programmed the unique interface so that it echoes an actual visit, where you can't help learning a few Tunisian words and with time, maybe starting to read written Arabic. Although it was designed for adults, children have shown a strong affinity with the CD-ROM and the interface is bilingual in English and French.
Source of Artist Statement]]> Artist Statement
What exactly IS writing? Is picture writing something that is half way between pictures and writing? And is it a useful concept for thinking about new media writing and interfaces? One approach to these questions is provided by Integrationism, a radical new theory of language and communication which Roy Harris has applied to a groundbreaking analysis of writing. In this view, writing is teased apart from speech (transcription of speech is just one of writing's possible uses) and re-aligned with spatial configurations in general. 'Picture writing' then becomes a meaningless and rather ethnocentric term because the boundary between writing and pictures is shown to be fluid, rather than fixed. These are quite difficult ideas to grasp in a world where written words are so important.
In Postcards from Writing, a kind of intellectual road movie, I artistically express my own encounter with them and explore their implications for new media writing and interfaces. My work offers users an interactive experience, rather than simply an illustrated lecture, because user interaction creates dynamic and multidimensional signs that illuminate the ideas I'm trying to express.
Source of Artist Statement]]>