Doctoral dissertation exhibition, So Near, So Far
Ph.D. in Digital Media and Experimental Arts, University of Washington
Dimensions Gallery, Bloomington, Indiana
Networked installation with real-time data, found-footage archive, smartphone interface, multiple screens, and LED sculpture
The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
(Whitehead, 1978)
I Hear a Tree in the Wind at Night is a networked installation in which live activity and archived images enter the same field. Real-time geolocational input and visitors’ smartphones feed a web-based system that retrieves found footage from a dynamic database, so that what is happening now and what was recorded before appear together across screens, light, and space.
Visitors’ phones act as inputs, shaping visual composition, spatial rhythm, and the distribution of light in the gallery. The screen becomes one point in a wider network through which movement, image, and mediated space are registered and redistributed. Navigation, signal exchange, database retrieval, and changing illumination form the material behavior of the work.
Physical presence and digital representation share one spatial system. Moving image, live data, and LED light produce a shifting field of light, shadow, and feedback that continually reorients the viewer. As with a tree heard in the wind at night, what is perceived arrives through the conditions that carry it rather than through direct sight.
I hear a tree in the wind at night 
