Made in collaboration with composer and artist Gryphon Rue, License modifies a video forensics report by The New York Times that reconstructs the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in U.S. history. John Cage’s infamous 1952 composition 4’ 33” (Four Minutes and Thirty-three Seconds) was the catalyst for our intervention. An emerging form of big data journalism, the audio and visual second-by-second account is organized by the shooter’s twelve bursts of gunfire. By erasing the intermittent voiceover that substantiates the timeline, silence punctuates the mayhem––mapped with intel gathered from cellphones, social media posts, police audio and bodycams––and allows the real of the havoc to resonate. Gambling, the gunman’s motive, the increasing body counts, and the structure of the Times report can all be correlated as a “numbers game”. By underscoring this logic, License shows algorithms now occupy the place of the Name-of-the-Father, the guarantor of patriarchal institutions, e.g., law, family, church, state, markets.
Daniel Chapman, a web developer, and I broke ground on the site June 8, 2015 and constructed and reconstructed it as our schedules allowed. My ambition was to create a comprehensive space to house my art and corresponding activities, which include writing, teaching and screenings. The site also encompasses my work in the field of contemporary psychoanalysis and includes links to other places of interest. Images of works from and installation views of exhibitions in most cases represent a portion of what was shown. Titles and details for individual works will be posted subsequently. The site will be updated on an ongoing basis.
Technical specifications for the site are as follows: for back-end development, we used Rails with a Postgres database with rspec for testing; AWS and Heroku for hosting of the files and site. For the front-end work, traditional javascript and jQuery work, with Sass for design.
I’m grateful to Daniel for his expertise, creativity, and commitment. For more information about Daniel and his work, click here.