ROLES: Artist, Creative Director, Producer, Photographer.

DESCRIPTION: Portraits of people sleeping in NYC trains during rush hour on weekdays only. Release forms are signed and portraits are tokenized and sold... benefitting each participant. As a top-of-funnel awareness strategy, portraits are made into posters and wheatpasted around the city.

CONTEXT: The train is not only the protagonist of the “Great American Expansion”, but also a site of commute between periphery and center... and mostly for purposes associated with labor and wage earning; especially during peak-hours on weekdays.

By isolating and framing these acts in this way, they become acts of passive interventions, asking the viewer to bear witness. But what exactly are we witnessing? A person is at their most vulnerable when they are asleep. Vulnerability implies a lack protection; a sacrifice, if you will. Who is tired? Where? Why? Regardless of the individual motivations of each individual sleeping subject, framed in this way, they become acts of passive resistance or protests against the cannibalistic effects of unsustainable labor practices.

After their portraits are taken, I wake them up and ask if they want to sign an agreement/contract stating that any revenue generated from their portrait is divided three-ways between myself, the broker/gallerist, and themselves. And while initially they're often quite annoyed at being woken up, once I've explained everything, they are always happy to sign. In this way, their sleep also becomes a type of labor in the economy of transactions... an economically empowering sleep. This project is aimed at empowerment. The type of scopophilic gaze I'm on the edge of here, can often serve exploitative ends... taking from participants and speaking about them as victims--further disempowering them. By going through the discomfort of waking them up and bringing them into the project as collaborators that are remunerated, they are empowered to own their sleep and profit from their labor/IP. This is not a passive, exploitative extraction or taking from the subjects, nor an elitist charitable gift/donation... instead, it strikes a balance, better described as a collaboration or partnership. Their agency is key to achieving this balance.

The city that doesn't sleep is a fun slogan, but it is sustained at the expense of people who are increasingly tired. An epidemic in the making. "A Tired City" is not an engineering or product-based solution, but instead, an exploration on expectations and perspective. It's an awareness play, operating in the realm of archiving, discourse and the production of meaning. The project is aimed at shifting perspectives/expectations about what is seen on these pictures and on these public sites of commute. Taking it one step further into the functional realm, by selling the portraits, I aim to subvert the dynamic between labor and sleep... creating a type of feedback-loop by where I'm responding to the labor that creates the sleep, by turning sleep back into labor. A poetic intervention/enterprise, it is strategically marketed in the guerrilla style of wheatpasted posters around the city.

"A Tired City" is made possible in-part by the Jerome Foundation and the Franklin Furnace Fund.

ROLES: Artist, Creative Director, Cinematographer, Install.

DESCRIPTION: Super slow motion video portraits of people being tickled, taken at various public sites around the world, displayed as a two-channel video installation. The video below is documentation of the installation as exhibited at the Pittsburgh Biennial. Out of Control won the Grand Prize at the Festival Internacional de Video Arte, in Camagüey, Cuba.

CONTEXT: A discourse, as described by Michel Foucault in "The Archeology of Knowledge", is “a group of statements for which conditions of existence are explicitly definable.” A discourse is also a historical event or an archive of historical statements. An archive is a system that governs the appearance of statements as historical events. If we’re not careful, however, we can confound between statements and events, which aren’t always the same thing. Similarly, events are not one in the same with their historicized counterparts. "Historical" events operate rhetorically in the realm of discourse. This approach to discourse analysis interrogates what Foucault calls, “the discourses of true and false… the correlative formation of domains and objects… the verifiable, falsifiable discourses that bear on them, and … the effects in the real to which they are linked.”

Foucault’s approach to discourse doesn’t try to reveal any essentially true meaning by what is said or not said. Instead, through a Foucauldian approach to discourse analyses, one tries to understand statements and social texts not so much for their meaning, but how they function in society. What are the constitutive effects of saying this instead of that? As Foucault argues, “The analyst’s job ‘does not consist, therefore, in rediscovering the unsaid whose place [the statement] occupies.” Instead, every thing is never said and the task is to determine, with all the possible statements that could be made on a particular subject, why it is that certain statements emerge, to the exclusion of all others... and what function they serve. In what ways do statements/discourses operate in society?

Pierre Macherey provides the following formula for the relationship between discourse and ideology. According to him, ‘what is important in a work is what it does not say. This is not the same as the careless notation “what it refuses to say”, although that would in itself be interesting: a method might be built on it, with the task of measuring silences, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged. But rather, what the work cannot say is important because there, the elaboration of the utterance is carried out in a journey to silence.’ What is uttered is merely the entry-point, the volitional stimuli through which we ingress toward the void of all the silences that give form to that singular utterance.

Foucault is correct in suggesting that ‘to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence to history and which had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value’. Ideology relies on a refusal of the unsaid: the negative space around what is said, but is nonetheless, not actually refutable by virtue of not being said. The unsaid here a type of additive silence, one that gives shape to the utterance.

How daunting a proposition to hear these silences when so much is being said, all the time! We’re being bombarded with information most of our waking lives. And now with our smart-phones, social media and a global audience, it’s a cliché to say that contemporary cultures and societies are characterized by discourse and representation. In today’s age, the document "stands in" for (or is a representation of) truth. The document becomes part of the archive of statements that become historicized. The way history is created through archives can influence collective memory. After all, culture is essentially our communal conceptual map of the world... a type of document in itself. But this is not to say that history and events are one in the same. Remember the silences. That which is not uttered, documented nor archived, but is nonetheless irrefutable and additive. It's not so much that truth is revealed by what is said, versus what is not said, but is nonetheless real, and true. As such, it's not so much about what is said, to the exclusion of all the unsaids, but why what is said is said, to the exclusion of all unsaids. The statement about an event, which is a type of document (but not the event itself), in turn can be further mediated/reproduced and historicized by archives that give those statements the appearance of the event itself... when instead, they are at best a historical event, which in this case, does not exist outside the realm of discourse. Archiving is one mechanism of historicization as an instrument of power. Those in power often use historicization to shape and control the narrative of the past in a way that supports their interests and legitimacy. This can involve highlighting certain events, figures, or aspects of history while downplaying or ignoring others. In essence, historicization is a powerful means of constructing and controlling the narrative of the past, which in turn can shape perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors in the present and future. And even though statements are not events (events don't have any inherent meaning, because nothing meaningful outside of discourse... as such, it is through dicourse that events gain meaning... and it is precisely in the realm of meaning that historicization operates), it is easy to see why documenting and representing ourselves has become very, very important. And we do a lot of it. With the proliferation of phone cameras and social media, it seems surprising that instead of becoming more diverse, modes of self-representation are becoming more and more codified into a narrow spectrum of expressions. Within the photographic landscape, these codes are largely reproducing dominant notions of beauty, power, control, and cool... lots of cool. I call this narrowing, to which we willingly conform, the “squeeze”.

This term has a dual meaning. Not only does it refer to the physical squeeze of muscles flexing, lips puckered, eyes squinting, stomachs tucked, but it also refers to the narrowing/homogenization of the types of expressions that are expressed/uttered. In surveying the media-scape of photographic images, I’m led to believe that we’re rapidly bottlenecking ourselves into the ducky-face. And there’s more and more of it everyday. In this light, my statement that “so much is being said” can be misleading because in fact, less and less things are being said more and more, to the exclusion of more and more things: diverse possibilities/expressions. These documents (images/texts), which circulate what we might call the “legitimate” channels of information (Facebook, Google, AP, Reuters, etc) become archived to legitimize what could potentially become the future epistemes naturalized into our volition. But I want more. Practically nothing has yet been said. In order to grow, we must expose ourselves to the unheard, unsaid, beyond the operative discourses encoded onto even our most primal physio-anatomical gestures. But instead of growth, we get the squeeeeeze!

This is the context through which I have begun to investigate the human nervous system in relationship to self-expression and documentation. Out of Control, the investigation to which I’m referring, emerged largely as a reaction to this squeeze.
The process begins when participants that are crowd-sourced in public plazas wherever the piece is shown, are tickled in front of a high-speed video camera (also in public), capturing a close-up of them going from straight-faced to ticklish chaos, at 500 frames per second. When played back at 24 frames per second, these detailed, slow-motion portraits are projected on large 8'x 8' walls, two at a time, as a video-installation. Through Out of Control, we see a community on the level of uncontrolled biological reflex. It's not about reproducing the squeeze of dominant codes, just our physio-anatomy in untamed expression... an unrefutable truth.

Through the lack of control we experience from tickling, we are able to see ourselves in ways we’ve probably never seen before: out of control. Everywhere I went with this project, participants said the same thing: they had never seen themselves, nor each other, in this way before. They weren’t just talking about the slow-motion, they were referring to their “tickle face”. We each have a distinct set of facial expressions that are expressed by our nervous system when we are tickled. We can call this our tickle face. It’s part of who we are and in some ways it’s as individual to us as our fingerprints. But then again, we also share a language in common. My interest here is not so much in the individuality of the expressions, but in their additive silence... that type of additive silence that had not hitherto been expressed, but that are not refutable in their silence. In addition, I'm interested in why certain expressions are expressed, to the exclusion of all others. Not an exageration, 100% of participants had never seen themselves in their tickle face before. It's always been there, stored as potential, but never expressed or documented before: this physiological reflex exists beyond the dominant codes talked about above. In revealing the concealed tickle face, we resist the productivity of discourse as it is deployed upon the representations of our communal and individual bodies. In a way, it renders participant’s faces temporary autonomous zones.

In Out of Control, the actors (participants) have no intent. After all, intent is linked to instrumentalization, historicization and power. While it cannot be understated that their participation is an index of their engagement with project (which is in itself a statement not devoid of meaning), the experience and response of the viewer (secondary audience) is characterized by the lack of intent inherent in the expressions portrayed. My concerns with video-documentation and slow-motion are more about a lack of exact predictability and the viewer’s recognition of the vulnerability of their own nervous system. It is precisely this limbic recognition that connects audiences to Out of Control in such a visceral and contagious way. It’s common to see people in front of Out of Control, just laughing uncontrollably themselves.

As a community portrait, Out of Control has allowed me to see whole communities in ways never seen before, rendering visible a type of “void” in documented facial expressions. Perhaps more subtly, however, as the project developed, notions of touch, proximity and intimacy revealed themselves. Having filmed for this project in Cuba, Brasil, Turkey and the United States, it was interesting to note that the rate of participation was the same in all of those places. While we have assumptions about Brasilians and Cubans being more comfortable with touch than, say, the Turks or Americans, I found that in setting up filming stations in public locations where I could have access to lots of people, the rate at which people agreed to participate in Out of Control was virtually the same in all locations. Over 300 people have participated so far. This process of documentation also forces passersby and participants to consider notions of touch, proximity and intimacy. While levels of participation were surprising, many people declined participation in the project. At the root of this working methodology is the fact that tickling involves touch. Not a hand-shake, which has been normalized into a non-sexual, non-intimate space... this tickling involved being touched on the rib-cage. This is not an area we are touched often. It’s a much more personal zone, thus, less open to touch. It was surprising to note, then, that in the USA and in Turkey, people were generally as comfortable with being touched as Brasilians and Cubans. In populated areas of Rio, Pittsburgh, Istanbul and Havana, I would ask about 80 people per hour. 25% agreed. From these numbers it’s not fair to suggest that touch in this way was readily welcomed. We understand why that is, because normalcy explains and justifies it. The public consensus around touch is generally aligned with dominant narratives of insecurity, fear and repression, all of which creates for many people a type of lethargy and distrust when faced by the choice to participate in this novel experience relating to touch and documentation. By encountering the option of participating in Out of Control, people were also forced into considering touch, their comfort and discomfort with the temporary proximity and intimacy it might entail, and position/reposition themselves accordingly. This consideration in and of itself is a type of participation.

All too often I would encounter passersby whom, when initially asked if they were interested in participating, would quickly dismiss it as weird and perhaps even creepy. This is what I actually think is the response most aligned with the dominant cultural paradigm. Yet, for some reason, they usually stayed around... or would come back several times but not participate. The power of curiosity! They would watch someone else get tickled and chuckle a bit. Then they might look, along with the person just tickled, at a playback of the video. At this point, they’re bonding with the person who they just saw get tickled, and they start asking more questions. Fast-forward a few minutes, they are sitting down on the chair, eagerly participating; calling their partners and family members to be involved, and even giving me their contact information so that they can keep in touch! Not only does Out of Control coalesce into an archive of a void in documented human expression beyond normative codes of beauty, control and power, but the process that comprises the project also confronts normative conceptions around touch, proximity and intimacy.

"Out of Control" is made possible in-part by the Pittsburgh Foundation and SPACE Gallery.

ROLES: Artist, Producer, Director, Cinematographer, Editor.

DESCRIPTION: "07-06-16" is the first installment from "The Negative Space Series": a series of short films adapted from real-life events, crowdsourced on social media from people all over the world.

CONTEXT: On July 6th, 2016, a traffic-stop-turned-deadly was live-streamed on social media for the world to see. The complexity of race relations in the USA is larger than what I can currently grasp. This project is my attempt at learning to "see" this event, without bringing all of my assumptions, biases and knowledge gaps to it. Instead of trying to depict the event itself, I'm attempting to discover the ways this tragic/traumatic event has permeated the mundane moments in people's lives all over the world... weaving a network of emotions and experiences that are complex and non-monolithic. Like looking for the negative space around the event, to better understand the event itself. The negative space, if you will.

What is Negative Space, you ask? Art teachers, for example, know well that the reason most people cannot draw realistically is not due to a lack of hand-eye coordination, but instead, as incredible as it sounds, it's because they don't see objects in front of them for what they really are. Instead, when the untrained try to draw, say, a chair, for example, they draw their assumptions of what a chair is... or should be... or has been. But this assumption of the chair is just a type of caricature, which does not look like the actual object in front of them. It sounds fictitional, but it's true. The reason novice artists cannot draw well is ot a problem of mechanics or thechnique as much a cognitive one. Therefore, the art instructor's job is actually to teach the student "how to see". As a former art teacher myself, I know this all too well. A method of teaching students to put their preconceived notions aside in order to better see the chair, is to have the students draw the "Negative Space" around the chair. So instead of drawing the chair, and bringing with it all of our assumptions of what a chair is supposed to be, we instead draw the space around the chair, and in-between the chair. The results are almost instantly better because the student has no assumptions about the air between and around the chair. It is undefined space, so we can more easily draw it as it is... you know, to a larger degree. As such, learning how to draw is learning how to see without assumptions and biases. A step towards objectivity. But an objectivity that does not negate perspective and point of view.

The Negative Space series takes this approach towards "learning how to see", and extrapolates it towards complex events in the world...by focusing on the space around them, so to speak. An attempt to discover and learn to see an event, without bringing all of my assumptions to it.

I use filmmaking and writing as a processing mechanism. And I needed to process the events of July 6, 2016. But attempting to speak about the event itself felt to large of a task. This is where the negative space methodology comes in to play. In order to better "see" the even without my preconceptions, I'd have to somehow draw the space around the event... as opposed to the event itself. In order to stay true to the the negative space methodology, I put out a call on my social channels, for people to submit short descriptions of where they were and what they were doing the moment they saw that tragic video, and how they were affected by it. I received many submissions, which I then turned into a series of short films entitled "The Negative Space Series". Through thinking about the moments submitted, by attempting to synthesize them into a type of collective conceptual map, then perhaps by using the craft of cinematic story-telling, I could potentially learn to "see" the event as a collection of experiences... in the process, helping to also give fidelity to the event itself. Castille was at the epicenter of the events of 07-06-16 in an irreproduceable way. But it is not disconnected from the ripples of cause and effect. In that sense, everything that happens, happens to all of us. Some of us are closest to certain events and some of us are farther away... still, I believe everything happens to all of us... even if differentially so. This filmmaking project is my own strategy for learning to "see" events that are too complex or too nuanced for me to render objectively. Naturally so, this approach starts as a listening process. Only after really listening and learning to see the space around the event, can I try to as a question...my, "How about this?" utterance. I'm not trying to bring my assumptions to it, nor do I want to assume an authoritative voice, either.

I hope to grow The Negative Space Series to accommodate other events and archives that are also submitted by participants all over the world.

ROLES: Artist, Creative Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor.

DESCRIPTION: While the entire world focused on the events taking place on the soccer pitch during the World Cup, I turned around and looked the opposite way. Devotion is the documentation of this turning around, so to speak, resulting in a single-channel video installation at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

CONTEXT: Elias Canetti, in "Crowds and Power", 1960, brings up the notion of the "crowd symbol", which is still relevant today in understanding crowds, and the masses' relationship to power. Canetti belleves that "crowd symbols" are actually collective Identities that do not consist of human beings (no physical, bodily mass) but are nevertheless felt as crowd-like. Ideologies, religions, nationalisms and sports function as "mass" symbols in the minds of individuals. These mass symbols are important for the formation of collective consciousness. Canneti states that "When people think of themselves as belonging to a nation at moments of national crisis, let us say at moments of national turmoll such as the outbreak of war, when they think of themselves as Englishmen or Frenchmen or Germans, what they have in mind is a crowd or a crowd symbol, something that they can relate to themselves." Any human being, any contemporary of the events of the last fifty years, anyone who has witnessed wars or been in a packed sports arena will surely feel the importance of masses. In crowds, people seem to revert to a archaic stage in which these internalized symbols/icons/ideologies have such a corporal significance that they become fully identifled with them. The symbolism and emotional reaction that then recurs in churches and sports arenas, for example, is a product of the collective identities that humans find themselves regressing towards, which have been implanted in people's minds for centuries. This points to something in human subjectivity, in people's subconscious, in their entire archaic inheritance to which this idea makes a powerful appeal.

The foundations of crowd theory were laid at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe by Gustave LeBon who first called attention to the crowd as a soclal phenomenon. LeBon asserted that rather than interpreting phenomena rationally, individuals in crowd situations become dominated by their unconscious personalities. Suggestion, imitation, and contagion result in the Infectious spread of emotions, whereby crowd members fall under the influence of a collective mind. Individuals have shed responsibility for their actions in the sea of anonymity. This conceptualization formed a framework for what would later be called contagion theory. In the mid-twentieth century, Herbert Blumer refined contagion theory by introducing the notion of a circular reaction, adapting the earlier ideas of Floyd Allport. During a circular reaction, responses of individuals within a crowd reproduce the responses of others around them, reflecting stimulation back and forth and thereby causing its intensification... a type of exponential feedback-loop. Individuals become sensitized to one another, experiencing rapport, which induces the lowering of social resistance and a loss of normal individual control. This becomes a type of communion, if you will.

The close-up portraits presented in Devotion, attempt to complicate the context of place and human emotion, relative to crowd behavior, crowd symbols and ideological investment. This single channel video Installation is a type of poetic-documentary focused on individual emotional responses to crowd symbols in sites of mass communion.

Presuming that the camera places us there, where are we? Where are they? These intense stares are rare in day-to-day life. Great focus is exhibited here. The value of every millisecond is perceived and scrutinized almost simultaneously, as the sermon of a great spiritual leader, or a politician declaring war.

The heightened levels of emotions could easily place these images inside of a Pentecostal church, or even a funeral. These events played out in the name of symbols and icons that are so important to the very core of each person's being, that some even lose control of themselves. They are literally carried away in emotion so great, as if the loss of a loved one, or the apparition of divinity in a religious context.

On the other side of the spectrum, very few moments are celebrated with such vigor. Scenarios at dance clubs or at carnaval may look suspiciously similar, but they lack a degree of volition. This type of ecstasy is several degrees less controllable. So much so, that a few degrees further could circle back into its antithetical state: a riot. Perhaps It's because of the emotional feedback loop that occurs in these types of mass communions where behaviors get modeled into something out of proportion.

In complicating these notions of place and context as they relate to the scale of emotional display contained within these images, perhaps it is possible to think about value, agency and communion in ways that contrast or differ from commonly accepted ideals. If asked what are the most important things in life, it's not uncomon to think of health, family, religion (for the religious) and world peace. These responses reflect our cultural ideals. Yet, the emotional responses presented here exist beyond these cultural ideals, perhaps illogically so, still, challenging our notions of value. Underneath these emotions there are gaps or silences between common assumptions about where we are and who we are.

"Devotion" was supported in part by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

ROLES: Artist, Creative Director, Technologist.

DESCRIPTION: The public are invited to a gallery opening. Upon entering the gallery, guests buckle on a customized stethoscope that amplifies their heartbeats through a small speaker (mounted on the same strap). The result is a room of people hearing each others actual hearts beating as they socialize.

CONTEXT: The heart is an involuntary muscle/organ, but it responds in real-time to chemical discharges from the brain. It can speak for us, if we listen. But for the most part, we hide this internal voice through layers of body language and chit-chat. As social creatures, we mediate even our most intimate relationships through layers of identities... it’s a mechanism largely associated with vulnerability and security. By exposing the heart in this sonic way, guests experienced a temporary mutual shedding of these layers of identity... a type of unveilling. It's a very vulnerable experience because you can't control your heart. Participants lose a kind of agency, passengers in their bodies. But in this mutual vulnerability, something unique takes shape. During the event, participants' hearts sped up, slowed down, sync'd up with others. Heart rates dance as people mingled, giving body to emotions and feelings that we might even rather ignore. In fact, it's incredible what you can reflect upon, if you just listen to your heart.

As I did with all my events, I invited a close friend and mentor of mine. He was an older gentleman, fought in WWII. He taught me a lot about acceptance, equality. He championed civil rights, and I always knew him to be very progressive with his values. He made the effort to come, because that is the type of person he was. At one point, we were together, and two black high school students of mine walked by. At that moment, his heart-rate sped-up noticeably. I looked at him, he looked at me, both of us slightly surprised, but he was also somewhat embarrassed... maybe even ashamed. We rode back home together and in the drive we talked about that moment. After a little reflection, and in a safe space, he openned up to me that at that moment, he was forced to confront something that he had learned at an early age (a byproduct of his generation), but had supressed for his entire life... to the point he even forgot that it was still there. After all, he was one of the most progressive people I knew. Having explored it a bit further, he concluded... "be careful what you learn, because maybe you won't be able to unlearn it. At best you might be able to supress it." But this day, in this way, this involuntary and visceral way of giving voice to his body, he was confronted with his subtle fear around melanated skin... socialized into his vulnerable and impressionable child-self growing up in the Jim Crow south. And despite having come a long way from that, on that day, he wandered how far he had really come.

"Heartbeats" was made possible in part by a Sprout Fund Seed Award.