- Staging Hauntology
Staging Hauntology belongs to a larger scholarly and artistic project that addresses the function of poiesis at the limits of the human. The work invites users to reflect upon poiesis as a collaboration among many creative actors, living and dead, machine and animal, spontaneous and algorithmic. Users may navigate through several simulated 3-D environments assembled in Adobe Flash. The spaces combine recognizable representations, such as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, with more fantastic scenes based on cultural mythology. The scenes are inspired by Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and his reflections on global media, cultural and intellectual inheritance, and the West’s preoccupation with the end of history. I exhibited a beta version of the project at the annual conference of the University Film and Video Association in 2008. The image on the right is a screen shot from a model of the Globe created in Maya.
- Thinking About the Pyramid
An online collaborative research and art project that I developed with Laura Sullivan and Michael Laffey. Plans for the project were presented in February 2007 at Imaging Place, a conference sponsored by the Florida Research Ensemble. The project focuses on the Pyramid, a public arena in downtown Memphis that once hosted the city's NBA team. Since a new arena opened downtown, city officials have been trying to find a new use for the Pyramid and are contemplating a sale to private interests. By initiating the "Thinking About the Pyramid" project, we hope to create a forum for voices not typically sanctioned by the planning protocols of urban development (i.e., the development board meeting, the zoning hearing, the chamber of commerce luncheon) and, in doing so, to insist that the Pyramid is a very public space whose fate should not be ceded uncritically to elite business and government interests. You can learn more about the project at its web site, www.thinkingaboutthepyramid.org. The image on the right is a screen shot of a Flash application that allows visitors to create customized images of the Memphis Pyramid and to save the images to their computers.
- Sticks of Fire
A long-term multimedia project that centers on the name given by the indigenous peoples of West Central Florida to what is now the region's largest city: Tampa. A popularly accepted translation of "Tampa" is "sticks of fire," which has been associated in local lore with everything from the early abundance of good kindling to the area's current reputation as the lightning capital of North America. The ongoing "Sticks of Fire" project involves digital photography, animation, 3-D modeling, and interactive components. It explores the author's hometown, the myth of Prometheus and the birth of techne, and the shift from print literacy to the digital age. The photograph on the right shows the "Sticks of Fire" sculpture on the University of Tampa campus.