My most recent work continues exploring intersections of physical and virtual existence. Becoming is a two-channel computer-driven video installation, in which two computer animated figures live in a minimally-furnished virtual domestic space. They stand and watch the viewer, yawn, sit on the sofa, talk on their cell phones, each on their own LCD screen. Alongside this simulation, another process continually manipulates their geometric mesh data, exchanging the vertex and polygon data between the two figures. Over time this causes each figure to take on attributes of the other, though distorted by the structure of their digital information. The process has none of the smoothness of a “morphing” effect, instead rupturing the surface of the figures and turning them into fragmented hybrids – two figures each becoming something new from the other's presence.

"bit rot" : n. A hypothetical disease of binary data, using an analogy to radioactive decay to explain the way that computer programs and files seem to get corrupted or stop working over time even if "nothing has changed."

BitRot is an exploration of the concept of digital decay and the effects of time in virtual environments. In computer simulations, 3D animation, or computer games, we see a furious push for ever greater visual approximations of reality. However, one significant difference between reality and even the most precise virtual environment is that the virtual environment does not age. A building in a VR world won't suffer the effects of time; if you 'die' in a video game, you can just restart. One of the primary hopes of digital information is that it will escape the limited lifespan of physical storage media. This hint of immortality is one of the core driving forces behind the allure of virtuality.

But this is now a world of actions without consequences, and without time as we understand it. A world without decay tends towards complete stasis, which is its own kind of entropy. Mortality and awareness of mortality is one of the things which makes us human. When we imagine transcending this core human attribute, it is always with great uneasiness - vampires, golems, Frankenstein's monster, automatons, robots, clones - the "un-dead" - provoke a distinct sense of the uncanny as they are alive yet in some crucial way NOT alive.

BitRot introduces these fundamental characteristics of the physical world into the virtual realm by both simulating material decay and introducing pure digital decay in the form of algorithmic decomposition on the data itself. This process is manifested through virtual fruit and flowers, displayed in full-color realtime 3d graphics. The virtual still-life "rots" over a duration of time, both in a precomputed simulation of actual rotting and through a degradation of the code and data. BitRot has been displayed as an interactive computer installation and as a 3d web environment.

Dots and Dashes is an interactive narrative in virtual reality using the CAVE. It’s loosely based on the book “Wired Love – A Romance in Dots and Dashes,” written in the 1860’s by a former telegraph operator, Ella Cheever Thayer, about online romance and heartbreak between telegraph operators. If we think of cyberspace as an alternate space mediated by electronic technology, then the telegraph network could be described as the first cyberspace. Beyond just the technology itself, much of the social impact of the telegraph networks prefigures the impact of the internet today – and exploring this history is a way of gaining understanding of our current technological moment.

The late Ann Richards, former governor of Texas, was famous for saying "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels." In Ginger Minus Fred, Fred Astaire is erased from a dance sequence with Ginger Rogers. The results are unsettling and hypnotic as she dips, bends and contorts around her non-existent dance partner. From this deconstruction of media, several ideas emerge. Her solo contortions become uncannily similar to women in the midst of performing hysterical fits. Her motions, in fact, bear a strong resemblance to Jean-Martin Charcot's classic photographic case studies of female hysterics. The piece is itself an act of obsession, where Fred is painstakingly erased frame by frame but his presence is still visible. Though her new dance is in some ways liberating, in the end Ginger is either under the control of a ghost figure, or under the control of the artist.

In recent years we have seen a dramatic increase in the use and sophistication of electronic surveillance systems in public space, in both physical and information space. In Chicago, for example, the mayor's goal is to cover the entire city with a complete blanket of video surveillance. Recent technological developments include camera networks with facial identification software which can be programmed to track specific individuals. The promise of greater security always brings with it the accompanying danger of potential abuse and the suppression of dissent. Video surveillance is just one of the ways in which we are increasingly blurring the lines between public and private space, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

The (In)Security Camera is a robotic surveillance camera with advanced computer-vision software that can track, zoom, and follow subjects walking through its field of view, assessing threat levels in real time and responding accordingly.

However, the camera is, in fact, a little insecure. Easily startled by sudden movements, it is shy around strangers and tends to avoid direct eye contact. The intention in creating the (In)Security Camera is to invert the relationship between the surveillance system and its subjects, giving the machine an element of human personality and fallibility that is by turns endearing, tragic, and slightly disturbing. This behavioral reversal can be read as an expression of the anxieties and fears underlying the security camera's authoritative role; as an anti-voyeuristic refusal of visual pleasure; or as a kind of withdrawal, avoiding difficult questions and challenges.

Information Farm harvests crops of local information from data fields in the Post-Soviet (Postsovkhoz) village of Mooste, Estonia. The Farm is operated by four Post-Orwellian Pigs who, along with an undercover feline colleague, boarishly solicit ethnographic field data from the village inhabitants. The villagers are encouraged to participate in their surveillance by contributing trivia to an interactive online map of the Information Farm territory. The assembled stories, rumors, and images are studiously reenacted by the blundering Pigs whose superficial video interpretations serve at once to obscure the mapped territory and to provide the incentive for an online game in which "information sniffing" becomes a sport.

Information Farm is a project created by Katherine Behar, Ben Chang, Joseph Ravens, and Silvia Ruzanka for the PostsovkhoZ 6 Symposium on "The Human Zoo" at MoKS Center for Art and Social Practice. The project seeks to address the fraught role of the "Ethnographer-As-Boar" in an age of consensual data surveillance.

The Jackal Project was a series of collaborative performances and installations with the TangentLab collective, a group of artists, designers and hackers. In the guise of the "jackals", a band of masked cyborg technology scavengers, we build new electronic artworks and irrational inventions out of discarded, obsolete, and forgotten technologies. The entire process is presented as part of the work, engaging the audience in the act of deconstruction and re-invention in a kind of improvisational hacker workshop street theater. In addition to the addictive cycle of forced obsolescence, we can observe another interesting trend in technological development - on the one hand, we have increasing power, speed, flexibility, convenience, and so on; while on the other, we see a constant drive on the part of industry to decrease the amount of control that we as consumers actually have over our devices. In contrast, the Jackals are interested in demystifying technology, sharing information, opening dialogues, and re-negotiating the relationship between people and their machines.

The structure of this project, as a collaboration, was deliberately designed as a collective. In the same way that we wanted to make our work process public and collaborative, we wanted to present an alternate model for non-hierarchical group action and production. We felt that this was particularly appropriate since we were working in the realm of technology which is primarily organized according to the logic of corporate capitalism.

Specific Jackal projects probe the interplay of technology and contemporary culture, taking on subjects such as wearable computing and digital surveillance. Examples of work created during these performances include the PDA or Personal Data Annoyance, a briefcase that emits a loud continuous stream of emails, to-do lists, appointments, and stock quotes; the BubbleViz Data De-Visualizer, which converts a digital wiretap into a stream of soap bubbles; and Guitar Gods, an interactive experience where viewers play modified toy guitars to remix video and audio clips of the greatest guitar solos of all time.