Published on the Web (online journal)

Employing their usual mix of animated black and white typography, jazzy music and humor, the work explores the international contemporary art market from the artists' perspective, through the use of an insomniac narrator musing over its persuasion. [Source: website description]

Underbelly is a playable media fiction about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in the north of England, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of repressed fears and desires about the artist’s sexuality, potential maternity and worldly ambitions, mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal. 

Created in Flash for the web, Underbelly incorporates a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation, text, interactivity and random programming within a traversable map-like narrative terrain. Its design is based on the remarkable uterine qualities of the Hereford Mappa Mundi combined with diagrams of female reproductive organs and 19th Century illustrations of mines and pit workers. Video, shot in  point-of-view close-ups, represents the woman’s above-ground activity and conscious concerns, but it’s persistently undermined by visual, vocal and kinetic elements generated by the ‘subconscious realm’.

Winner of the New Media Writing Prize 2010

Winner of the MaMSIE Digital Media Competiton 2010/11

From the publication web site:

The bizarre and tragic deaths of Margaret Chandler and Gib Bogle on the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney, 1963, remain an elusive and intriguing Australian mystery. This website explores the theme of inconsistent and impermanent memory, allowing you to shift forward and backward through time, space and point-of-view, and so compare eyewitness accounts of the deaths. The story is represented by a montage of sound, image and text, and is controlled via a map/graph interface. As you progress through it, the project becomes less about solving the crime and more about revealing the enigma of individual experience and interpretation. It is also about how a time and place, in this case Cold War Sydney, inescapably shapes the perceptions of the people who live within it, and how people who suffer an unexplainable tragedy are often blamed for it. It is the story of an improbable murder or an implausible accident; a puzzle without a solution where objective truth becomes impossible to grasp because it does not exist.

Online work first published in 2008. Main theme: nature. As the work is loading, a quote appears: "It's not safe out here. It's wondrous." The fog shifts to reveal a lone tree, a flock of birds scatter. A deep drone is sounding. When attempting to click on the birds different texts are activated. When managing to "catch" one of the birds, one of the previously dimmed texts will appear.

Genesis is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet. The key element of the work is an "artist's gene", a synthetic gene that was created by Kac by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work. The sentence reads: "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." It was chosen for what it implies about the dubious notion--divinely sanctioned--of humanity's supremacy over nature. Morse code was chosen because, as the first example of the use of radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age--the genesis of global communication. The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changed the biblical sentence in the bacteria. After the show, the DNA of the bacteria was translated back into Morse code, and then back into English. The mutation that took place in the DNA had changed the original sentence from the Bible. The mutated sentence was posted on the Genesis web site. In the context of the work, the ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it.
(source: author)

"Re:Positioning Fear" was the third relational architecture project. A large scale installation on the Landeszeughaus military arsenal with a "teleabsence" interface of projected shadows of passers-by. Using tracking systems, the shadows were automatically focused and generated sounds. A real-time IRC discussion about the transformation of the concept of "fear" was projected inside the shadows; the chat involved 30 artists and theorists from 17 countries and the proceedings can be seen at the project web site. Source: Author's website.

Along the briny beach a garden grows. With silver bells and cockleshells, cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh. A coral orchard puts forth raucous pink blossoms. A bouquet of sea anemones tosses in the shallows. A crop of cliffs hedges a sand-sown lawn mown twice daily by long green-thumbed waves rowing in rolling rows. The shifting terrain where land and water meet is always neither land nor water and is always both. The sea garden’s paths are fraught with comings and goings. Sea birds in ones and twos. Scissor-beak, Kingfisher, Parrot and Scissor-tail. Changes in the Zoology. Causes of Extinction. From the ship the sea garden seems to glisten and drip with steam. Along a blue sea whose glitter is blurred by a creeping mist, the Walrus and the Carpenter are walking close at hand. A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk along the briny storied waiting in-between space. Wind blooms in the marram dunes. The tide far out, the ocean shrunken. On the bluff a shingled beach house sprouts, the colour of artichoke. On the horizon lines of tankers hang, like Chinese lanterns. Ocean currents collect crazy lawn ornaments. Shoes and shipwrecks, cabbages and kings. Water bottle caps and thick white snarls of string. At dawn an ancient tractor crawls along the briny beach, harvesting the tide’s leaves. The world’s plastic, the sea’s weeds.

_][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ ho.][email][list.ically documents select phases of the mezangelle language system and its ][r][evolution[1995-2001]. the texts presented here act as residual traces from net.wurk practices that thrive, react N shift according 2 fluctuations in the online environment in which they ][initially][ gestated.

(Source: Author's description)

Publised in Beehive 5.1 (06.2002), also hosted at The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture at Virginia Tech

A set of interactive Flash poems exploring different aspects of interface, recombination, and intermediality.

Published in 2003 State of the Arts anthology CD. Published online in 2005 by The Other Voices Poetry Project.