Statements of innocence in the last words of death row inmates executed in Texas from 1986-2026. Non-exhaustive. Read more at goodbyewarden.wttdotm.com
My latest piece! “Dimensions — Study” is a recreation of the first simulation of a black hole published by Jean-Pierre Luminet in “Astronomy and Astrophysics,” Vol. 75 in 1979. To make it, I converted the original image into a bitmap, broke it up into 50 sections, converted each section into gcode for use in a pen plotter, converted my 3d printer into a makeshift plotter, plotted each section with white ink on black paper, cut them all to size, hand painted 50 wooden 8”x8” panels, mounted each paper section onto its respective panel, and then mounted the finished panels onto the wall.
Dimensions is something of a reflection of the current state of my practice. I made it out of obsession and frustration, feeling creatively stagnant while admiring at art from others that I felt I was equally capable of. It was a gauntlet thrown at myself — to prove that resources were an excuse, that most things were figure-outable, and that there was nothing, actually, stopping me from making something big. This thing is 8 feet wide, I have nowhere to put it, it’s awesome.
It is named for the theme I kept running into throughout the project: the physical imposition of the dimensions in the size of both the subject and the piece itself; the dimension reduction in flattening a simulation to a scan to a pure bitmap and making a 3d printer operate on a 2d plane; the array and depth considerations of sourcing and organizing each panel; and the dimension of time that black holes seem to stretch, both in nature and in the long days of production in my basement, all shown here.
I’m calling it a study because while I consider it pretty done for now, I do want to make it bigger and better in the future. There are so many things I see to improve, like plotting with paint directly on the panels, shifting the grid lines, and most intriguingly re-running the original simulation to generate a pure starting image instead of working from a scan.
For now, however, the itch has been scratched. Nothing is perfect, and things are not easy, but there is - if nothing else - always more.
10 select examples of humanity and marginalia from High Schoolers and Census Workers in the 3500+ Handwriting Sample Forms collected by the US Government to train one of the first Optical Character Recognition models back in the late 80s/early 90s
Sigils I: Crouch
Big thank you to @rhizomedotorg , @claudeai , and @newinc for letting me put the biggest version of it yet on display at @zerospace yesterday :)
