Year-Long Project: "The Archive"

Being here in the UAE has presented some significant challenges in my work. The fact that I have assurances of free speech here at my University does not mean that a media activist like me can speak freely throughout the UAE has set me to framing my work in a certain way.  I am categorizing my work for the year as a series of projects titled "The Archive", which deals with critical issues of society, art, and communication in the Middle East, the UAE, and so on.  Here are some projects under way:

Songs for Muezza: Embedded Cat Scans.
There is an Islamic legend regarding the Prophet's favorite cat, Muezza. When we was going for morning prayer, he found that she had fallen asleep on his sleeve.  He loved her so much that he cut off his sleeve as not to wake her.



From this, I'm doing 3D scans of Sleeping cats and printing those through Shapeways. The first is beautiful, but the sandstone is too brittle for things like ladder back chairs.

Meshnet.UAE - Autonomous Kitty Cinema

Meshnet. UAEII - The Darkweb Novel

Songs for Muezza - Cat Scans

Glitch.Paintings/Video

Digital Minimalism/Video

Multichannel projection (7up?)

Things of Internet - Shoecat (Internet Mutoscopes)

SSTV Video - Haram

SSTV Video - Visual Poetry I

Tapestries

The Masarabiya Project

Globalist Realism Paintings III - The Blimp I & II

Second Front @ The Wrong Biennial (Done)
                           Do it.
                           Rake's Progress

Arduino panorama widget

Land.Drone/Rover Project

Permanent Light  - Linear displays

Weather Music

Arabic FLUXUS

Road Trips UAE/Cinema of the motor (drone/Road trips)

Anthropocene Tapesrty

AR Alaska

Slow Scan Video

For the moment, these are placeholders as the work expands.

Love and New Media

Summer of Love @ the Chicago MCA, 2009.

A good friend of mine, E. Marie Robinson, sent me a missive she wrote when she met me in 2008:
Love and New Media: 2008.

I was surprised that I had been talking about this that far back, as my work with the Summer of Love project and Ghosts of Adak started in 2009, and the Cura Bodrum and Love at First Site projects were 2010.  The Kaleidoscope project was last year, I think (2014).

As I spend my 400 days (metaphorically) in the desert, I've been at a quandry in regard to my work as an artist and critic.  I can't really do the critical/activist work out here at all, and this has hobbled my work.  I'm planning on going back to my work regarding the conversations between my father and I on the Aleutian Island of Adak soon.  It's just that while I was a central player in a group called The Yes Men, graduate school and family pressures pushed me back, and I wonder how I can best serve society now.

Love. Especially given the events in Paris, what a concept, eh?