This project looks at where open-source ethos and artistic labor meet. It came out of research into low-cost industrial materials: a large-format pen plotter that translates digital data into physical paintings. At first it was a critique of the art market's focus on outcome, and of the unseen labor of the artist's assistant. Then it moved toward collaboration across borders. With protocols that let identical machines be built in different countries, it forms a digital tunnel that bridges physical distance. I taught my brother to build one in Iran. The ongoing Digital Teleportation series uses the same process: paintings sent as data and redrawn by identical machines in different countries.

The workflow uses Rhino Grasshopper to split an image into CMYK channels and turn raster data into vector curves and G-code. The plotter then draws the halftone with ordinary pens. I keep the materials to things you can buy anywhere, paper and pens, so the process works like a material game of telephone. A letter can pass where an artwork cannot.

My mother lives in Iran and I live in the US. My identical twin brother became my proxy. He scanned her hand there and I printed it here. Photogrammetry promised to collapse the distance between the two countries with godlike accuracy, but the G-code of a 3D printer cannot recreate essence, and this game of marionette fails. These works are what that failure left behind, and how I learned to remember her without trying to teleport her.

I taught myself how to build a 3D printer to teleport my mother's hand. My twin brother scanned her hand in Iran and I printed it in the US. Photogrammetry has a godlike dimensional accuracy, but the G-code of a 3D printer cannot recreate essence. The prints became a record of that failure, and building the printer also helped me think about how I teach making.

Cherry wood darkens in light. I use that photosensitivity to make objects that change and react to their environment. When a hand is held against the wood, it leaves a silhouette, and over time that trace fades. With this material I wanted to move away from the failure of technology and toward reaction.

A Z-depth map is a grayscale image where brightness stands for distance instead of color. Current research can rebuild a 3D model from a single photograph through a map like this. I use depth maps as part of the process: to rebuild form from images, and to draw and make things from that depth. Images and more text coming soon.

The ties that bind existence to meaning offer powerful forms through which we can examine the nature of Being. I examine technology through opposing concepts of death, time, and space. My work is a mirror reflecting how the technology of this century has evolved into an individualistic desire machine. While confronting these forces, it ultimately finds salvation through the exercise of inner freedom. Here, art becomes a form of resistance and reclamation, the last stand for humanity against commodifying systems.

More images from the studio coming soon.