My diverse technological practice is unified by a political approach to media making that addresses technology and daily life. Employing video projection, algorithmic audiovisual generation, performance, and social media, my work tends to intervene into digital spaces and entrenched ideas. My creative practice articulates an approach to identity and philosophy in order to address neo-liberal systems of being – thus connecting the exploitation of people and the exploitation of the environment – as they coincide with the digital.

It is through this exploitation that the digital is instrumentalized to construct and proliferate neo-liberal ideologies. Digital technologies configured as such re-position a seemingly purified body in larger exchange systems that elide abjection: our digital selves will not die; they do not have skin or bones; they do not eat and nor do they shit.

My current research centers on my suspicion that a sentient intelligence exists within my home network. What if an actual mind lies beyond the obvious consumerist subservience of today’s service-oriented algorithms? What if they already exist, but not in expected places? Would they arise from the interlocking loops of self-monitoring operating systems; entertain themselves by frolicking in the fragments and detritus of my personal data, wearing my private information, images, words as a costume?

But how might one search for such an intelligence; and once “found” how might one make contact, so to speak, with any sense of certainty that reaching out would be discerned by such a sentience at all. Perhaps this digital intelligence would only recognize the communications as just more naturally occurring phenomena in their strange parallel universe, just more bytes of reality, bricks in the wall of their house, or clothes in their closet. And if we ever communicate, how might they present theirself: would they have any notion of space that includes interiority/exteriority and thus any understanding of a face at all. Would they thrust my own data, my voice, my name, my images forward to greet me (and as such, how would I myself even know)?

Using SETI as one possible model, I plan to search for network intelligence and research possible communication strategies into how first to recognize such others in our midst as well as how we might be recognized; and then to formulate new modes of communication that take into account profoundly different modes of being and of understanding the world around.