MAKING NATURE COMPUTE
This series grew out of my desire to bring together materials that felt alien to each other and see what emerged. Nothing starts from nothing was the thought playing in my mind, and so I set out to find materials that possessed some generative quality. I chose linen fabric similar to the type used by Egyptians to wrap their mummies in for the afterlife; grape vine wood, which wine makers graft onto new root stock year after year; and ceramic disc capacitors and radial varistors used in computer circuitry to transform 1s and 0s into everything imaginable.
For the first several pieces, I hand-sewed the computer parts using linen thread. The shapes that emerged looked like a strange new species caught under a microscope—as if the evolutionary process had been suddenly triggered—so I placed them in hand-made resin Petri dishes. As the series evolved, the pieces moved off the Petri dishes and eventually onto the grape vine wood, where they grew larger and more encrusted. The work forced me to shift between the act of assembling and disassembling as I pulled apart four feet of linen fabric, thread by thread, and then used that thread to join thousands of tiny electronic computer parts to each other and later to the wood. This meant that throughout the process, I experienced the parts coalescing into a whole, even as I was constantly reminded how each whole was made up of so many small parts.
For the first several pieces, I hand-sewed the computer parts using linen thread. The shapes that emerged looked like a strange new species caught under a microscope—as if the evolutionary process had been suddenly triggered—so I placed them in hand-made resin Petri dishes. As the series evolved, the pieces moved off the Petri dishes and eventually onto the grape vine wood, where they grew larger and more encrusted. The work forced me to shift between the act of assembling and disassembling as I pulled apart four feet of linen fabric, thread by thread, and then used that thread to join thousands of tiny electronic computer parts to each other and later to the wood. This meant that throughout the process, I experienced the parts coalescing into a whole, even as I was constantly reminded how each whole was made up of so many small parts.
