American Diaries reflects on the unseen aspects of American life, the parts often obscured from a distance. My country's culture, like much of the Eastern world, has been shaped by Western cultural hegemony and the pervasive imagery of Americana. In this context, the exhibition weaves these threads together through firsthand experience. Each piece is accompanied by short diary entries that serve as letters to the viewer in another country, confronting the contrasts of life, privilege, and hardship, including racism, economic disparity, and the complexities of living in the "dreamland."

The works are produced in conjunction with the Digital Teleportation series, using a similar process. Each piece is translated into a halftone, converted to G-code, and sent to a DIY CNC pen plotter that I taught my brother to build, where the plotter reproduces the work, circumventing the limits on mailing physical artwork across borders.

The project investigates the intersection of open-source ethos and artistic labor. Emerging from research into low-cost industrial materials, I developed an open-source, large-format (4 × 8 ft) pen plotter designed to translate digital data into physical paintings. Initially a critique of the outcome-driven focus of the art market, reflecting on the often unseen labor of the "artist's assistant," the project shifted toward transnational collaboration: by developing protocols that allow identical machines to be built in different countries, it forms a "digital tunnel" that bridges physical distance and surpasses border limitations. The workflow uses Rhino Grasshopper to split CMYK channels, converting raster data into vector curves and G-code that drive the plotter to draw halftone images with common writing implements. By restricting materials to globally available consumer products (paper, pens), the project functions as a material "game of telephone," allowing physical letters to bypass geographical limits.

More on the plotter and the process on the Research page.