Social Practice

Tenant Self-Defense - In collaboration with Zeph Fishlyn and their Office of Neighborship, we led a series of movement workshops teaching participants about tenants' rights and the nuances of recent rent control legislation.

The limitless potential of clay - In collaboration with Stefan Kovatchev, mold-maker and owner of Portland's A1 Birdbath, a number of artists and myself created a community event to celebrate the life and work of Stefan's friend, a renowned local sculptor, Jim Gion.

Canton Grill Degustatory Research - Investigating both personal and collective histories alongside the role of food in migration, we created a sensorial ten-course tasting experience serving samples intermingling culinary art, performance, research and personal histories.

Between Two Shores - Working with a community center summer youth program, we created a project exploring inter-generational exchange and re-enactment.

People’s Emergency Broadcast Service (PeEBS) - A pop-up radio station that interviewed people about displacement and conducted workshops on how artists can work together to be a de-gentrifying force instead of one instrumentalized by developers and a city that contributes to inequitable development.

Portland Institute for Contemporary Enaction (PICE) - PICE is a contemporary institute exploring the intersections of action and inaction and enaction.

Orbiting Together - A series of participatory performances triggered by satellites flying overhead that created a GPS-like network of individuals engaging their innate sense of direction.

Temporary Sculptures for a Sculpture Park - Temporary sculptures, performance scores, and tours created during a residency at Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park, based on interviews with park employees.

Dead Dad Dining Club - A series of public meals that explored fatherlessness through re-enactment and embodiment.

We Are a Crowd of Others - A collaboration with Gail Grinnell and Samuel Wildman where we used our residency at MadArt Studio to weave together an expansive, site-specific installation with a series of public programs investigating the resonance of hauntings between generations.

Exercising the Work - A tour of Seattle Art Museum's collection using a series of exercises to help participants experience the work emotionally in their bodies instead of with their eyes.

Seaworthy (Curation) - For a year I co-curated an artist run space dedicated to creative practices that value collaboration, experimentation, and social engagement.

Video

Sharing Our Voices - A series of animated short films with drawings and muppet-style puppets based on oral histories celebrating voices from Seattle's vibrant LGBTQ community, created in collaboration with Seattle Public Libraries.

Automatic Messaging Medium - An installation consisting of a toll-free phone message service, wheat-pasted psychic medium advertisements, and a projected hologram of collected pop-culture representations of ghosts.

No Entiendo Nada - A video exploring mistranslation, presumption, and tokenization based on travels through Colombia.

Hey Girl Music Video - Stop animated video created with James Smith for Tacocat's song "Hey Girl", a funny and sarcastic attack on cat-calling culture.

I </3 NY - A series of video meditations destroying souvenirs celebrating a past life.

Technology

Hear Here, Walla Walla - A phone storyline and website that maps the community of Walla Walla, WA through stories of immigrants and first generation Walla Walla residents.

Dial an Old Friend - In collaboration with Samuel Wildman we made a hotline for people to learn about the city of Portland from elder community members at the Hollywood Senior Center.

Automatic Messaging Medium - An installation consisting of a toll-free phone message service, wheat-pasted psychic medium advertisements, and a projected hologram of collected pop-culture representations of ghosts.

Memetic Therapy #2 - A series of free relationship therapy sessions that were video taped and obfuscated with face detection and lolcat translation software.

A Comedy in Four Acts - An interactive installation created with micro-controllers, two-way mirrored boxes and florescent lights.

Quantifying Contentment - For over 60 days I tried to gather statistics about my mood and a number of factors that I felt impacted it and created a data visualization of the results.

Childhood Ghosts - Childhood Ghosts was an interactive animation I created using openFrameworks, openCV, and custom gesture detection algorithms to animate a series of hand drawn frames that were responsive to the audience.

BoozBot - In collaboration with Eyebeam fellows Jeff Crouse and David Jimison, I created a communication and brain framework for a robotic bartender named BoozBot.

Dirt Party - In collaboration with Jeff Crouse and David Jimison, I created a kiosk application that helps people gather tabloid-like dirt on fellow party goers.

Anywhere But Here - In collaboration with Eyebeam fellows Jeff Crouse and David Jimison, Anywhere But Here, allowed people at a party to pretend to be at a cooler party where they were being photographed by scene photographers.

Performance

Tenant Self-Defense - In collaboration with Zeph Fishlyn and their Office of Neighborship, we led a series of movement workshops teaching participants about tenants' rights and the nuances of recent rent control legislation.

Canton Grill Degustatory Research - Investigating both personal and collective histories alongside the role of food in migration, we created a sensorial ten-course tasting experience serving samples intermingling culinary art, performance, research and personal histories.

Spectate or Speculate! - In collaboration with Zeph Fishlyn's Office of Neighborship, we explored supply-side arguments for solving the housing crisis and invited the public to maximize their profits through Real Estate Investment Trusts.

Orbiting Together - A series of participatory performances triggered by satellites flying overhead that created a GPS-like network of individuals engaging their innate sense of direction.

All I ever wanted was all of your attention - Samuel Wildman and I asked the audience to curate tiny performances we would enact through an open call for dares.

Failure Variety Show Rube Goldberg Machine - Timothy Firth and I created a Rube Goldberg machine that predicted the future, and tried to rapidly install it during a variety show on artistic failure at Bumbershoot in Seattle.

Cheap Tricks - An interactive fundraiser asking: How will you exploit your friends? How low will you go for a quick buck? What feats will a hungry artist do to get their work finished?

Publications

Intergenerational Skill Exchange - Instructions for a block party project published in Lauren Moran's "Scores for a Block Party".

SoFA Journal - The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a bi-annual publication dedicated to supporting, documenting, and contextualizing socially engaged art and its related fields and disciplines.

Dead Dad Dining Club - A series of public meals that explored fatherlessness through re-enactment and embodiment.

Are you exhausted? - Print project and performance where I hand printed as many posters as I could until I had to quit from exhaustion. Poster's were put up around Seattle promoting Le Petit Nickel, a publication soliciting unpaid opportunities in the arts.

Finding the Through Line - In collaboration with the non-profit Facing Homelessness, I created non-figurative "portrait" sharing the stories and art of Todd Kline, a precariously housed artist who was once famous for balancing rocks along the West Coast.

Le Petit Nickel - A classifieds newspaper and performance created as a reference point to continue the conversation around the roles and economics of artists and institutions in our contemporary life.

Performance Response Series: On The Boards - Tessa Hulls and I collaborated on a series of creative responses to each performance in the On the Boards 2013-14 season.

Oral History

Hear Here, Walla Walla - A phone storyline and website that maps the community of Walla Walla, WA through stories of immigrants and first generation Walla Walla residents.

Between Two Shores - Working with a community center summer youth program, we created a project exploring inter-generational exchange and re-enactment.

Dial an Old Friend - In collaboration with Samuel Wildman we made a hotline for people to learn about the city of Portland from elder community members at the Hollywood Senior Center.

Sharing Our Voices - A series of animated short films with drawings and muppet-style puppets based on oral histories celebrating voices from Seattle's vibrant LGBTQ community, created in collaboration with Seattle Public Libraries.

Sonic Decay - In collaboration with Emory Liu, Sonic Decay was a series of audio/visual based experiences focused on Seattle's DIY music venue history.

Be Vintage - Using solicited advice from octogenarians in the community, we created a marketable health and lifestyle plan consisting of a web based platform, thematic podcasts, and ad campaign.

Objects

Temporary Sculptures for a Sculpture Park - Temporary sculptures, performance scores, and tours created during a residency at Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park, based on interviews with park employees.

Automatic Messaging Medium - An installation consisting of a toll-free phone message service, wheat-pasted psychic medium advertisements, and a projected hologram of collected pop-culture representations of ghosts.

SCVNGRHNT - An ongoing project where I collaborate with people to create a scavenger hunt list and then pass a disposable camera back and forth until every item is captured on film.

Remove All Dads #2 - Installation consisting of a poem displayed next to a series of family portrait coffee mugs with the dad removed using Photoshop's Content-Aware Fill®.

Sitte Meditasjon - A flat pack chair that skewed to perfectly match the drawing in the instructions.

Finding the Through Line - In collaboration with the non-profit Facing Homelessness, I created non-figurative "portrait" sharing the stories and art of Todd Kline, a precariously housed artist who was once famous for balancing rocks along the West Coast.

Just Don’t - A series of wheatpaste throwups and a poster for a community project.

Let it Slide - A temporary installation of a slide and score on a dock in the summer.

Failure Variety Show Rube Goldberg Machine - Timothy Firth and I created a Rube Goldberg machine that predicted the future, and tried to rapidly install it during a variety show on artistic failure at Bumbershoot in Seattle.

Emotional Obstacle Course #1 - A participatory installation created with Michelle Peñaloza, loosely based on the Catholic Stations of the Cross.

Tarpaulin Sky (part i, ii) - An installation of tarps representing two distinct nights, the date my father was born and the date he passed away.

May 1968 - Wheat-pasted protest slogans from the May 1968 student protests in France.

A Comedy in Four Acts - An interactive installation created with micro-controllers, two-way mirrored boxes and florescent lights.

Quantifying Contentment - For over 60 days I tried to gather statistics about my mood and a number of factors that I felt impacted it and created a data visualization of the results.

Extinctable - A collection of encyclopedia volumes altered into pop-up bird field guides about the Passenger Pigeon, a species that went from being one of the most abundant birds in the world to extinction in 1914.

Tunnels - Two site specific sound installations of abandoned and boarded up crawl spaces were created for the Smoke Farm Lo-Fi Arts festival.

I threatened to jump 207 times in 1986 - A series of blue ink drawings on paper of forests and childhood memories.

An Insurable Disaster - A time-based, participatory project where people wrote down items they would ensure in their home on boxes they used to create a tower of boxes reaching the height of a four story house.