● ● ● Selected Work

Banquet

Microbot TeachMover mechanical arm, Fisherbrand Isotemp Advanced stirrer hotplate, chicken egg with vinyl-printed quine in
a custom esoteric programming language, first edition of
The Explorers Cookbook: An International Potpourri of Recipes and Tales from World Adventurers, and an original photograph of the 1951 Explorers Club Annual Dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel

2026

A natural history museum is, at bottom, a paper machine. Its authority over the millions of objects in its care rests not on the objects themselves, which are mute, but on the slips of paper affixed to them, the accession card, the determination label, the specimen tag bearing a name, a date, and a hand. The label is the instrument through which a dead thing is made to declare what it is, and the entire edifice of taxonomic knowledge stands upon the trust invested in those small inscriptions, on the assumption that the word on the jar and the matter within it correspond. Banquet departs from the single most spectacular failure of that assumption.

In 1951, the Explorers Club convened its annual dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel, where the members were served a dish the menu declared to be woolly mammoth. The credibility of the claim rested on no verifiable encounter with the animal, for none had occurred, but on the social machinery arranged around it, the standing of the Club, the gentlemanly word of its members, and above all, the authority of a single handwritten label, which did the work the meat itself could not. The flesh had been procured by Wendell Dodge, a Club member and onetime theatrical agent to Mae West, an apprenticeship in illusion that proved better preparation than it might appear, and Dodge inscribed the preserved portion not as mammoth but as Megatherium, the giant ground sloth, an error that admitted a second extinct creature into a lineage that would, in the end, require a third and living one to settle.

The specimen traveled as whatever it had been declared to be. Delivered to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich and passed onward to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, it was accessioned as YPM HERR 019475 and lodged among the herpetology holdings, a jurisdiction no one then suspected of being correct. For more than sixty years, the thing spoke only as its inscription instructed, a marvel of deep time held in suspension by the word affixed to its jar. Then, in 2016, an analysis of its mitochondrial DNA pronounced it a green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas, and the herpetology drawer, by the dumb luck of a misfiling, turned out to have been right all along. The matter had not altered in the slightest; only its meaning had, and at that, the whole apparatus of authentication that had sustained it as a wonder dissolved into the ordinary. The label, which had been the sole instrument of its conversion, fell silent.

In Banquet, a Microbot TeachMover, an educational mechanical arm of the 1970s, is set to crack a single chicken egg upon a laboratory hotplate once each year, on the anniversary of the dinner. Across the shell, printed in vinyl, runs a quine, a program whose entire operation is to produce a faithful copy of its own source code and nothing besides. It is composed in a custom esoteric language whose vocabulary admits only three words, Mammoth, Sloth, and Turtle, the three identities the specimen has worn across its institutional life, so that the program can utter nothing that does not pass through the history of the hoax, reproducing itself endlessly in the only three terms the deception ever supplied. Beside the egg sit a first edition of The Explorers Cookbook: An International Potpourri of Recipes and Tales from World Adventurers (1983) and the single surviving photograph of the 1951 dinner, a room of men in evening dress raising their forks to a meal that was, at the very instant the shutter fell, already something other than what every one of them believed.

Pyramid Power

Photocopy on paper with a water-embossed David Swensen Asset Management Institute at Yale emblem, projected pyramid made of gold-coated Mylar tape

2026

In the 1930s, a French ironmonger and pendulum-dowsing enthusiast named Antoine Bovis claimed to have discovered that small models of the Great Pyramid of Giza could preserve organic matter from decay. The story that traveled, though Bovis himself never confirmed it, was that he had entered the King's Chamber at Cheops and found a garbage can full of dead cats that had not decomposed. Whether or not he ever visited Egypt, Bovis built cardboard pyramids in his workshop, oriented them on a north-south axis, and placed dead animals inside. They mummified. The shape, he concluded, was the active agent.

In 1949, inspired by Bovis, Karel Drbal, a radio engineer in Prague, filed a patent for what he called a method of maintaining razor blades without mechanical, chemical, thermal, or electrical intervention. The device was a hollow pyramid proportioned after Cheops, built from dielectric material, and aligned to the magnetic meridian. A blade placed at one-third of its interior height would, Drbal reported, last an average of 111 shaves. The Czechoslovak patent office took ten years to grant the claim. Patent No. 91304 was published in August 1959. The instrument has no moving parts. It requires no energy source. Its operating principle is its geometry. The document was authenticated by the state filing apparatus and left to circulate, a certified inscription of a claim the certifying body had no framework to evaluate.

By the 1970s, pyramid power had entered American consumer culture in the form of plastic generators, vinyl meditation tents, and energy plates sold by mail order. It had also, quietly, already been standing over Wall Street for half a century. In 1912, the Bankers Trust Company unveiled what was then the tallest building in New York's financial district, a thirty-five-story tower at 16 Wall Street capped by a six-story stone pyramid. The shape became the bank's logotype, appearing on its stationery and advertising. When asked, decades later, about the pyramid's effects, an assistant vice president named Patrick Connor offered what may be the most concise formulation of the relationship between geometric form and financial credibility ever committed to the record. "Maybe the pyramid does have magical powers that give us an edge over our competitors."

Pyramid Power takes Connor at his word. The project traces a single line of capital from Yale University's endowment, through the David Swensen Institute for Asset Management, to the fractional-ownership art platform Masterworks, where the investment terminates in the purchase of six shares of Jean-Michel Basquiat's Made in Japan II. The painting, incorporated as a Delaware limited liability company and registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, does not need to be seen or moved. It sits in climate-controlled storage while its documentary proxies circulate, the offering circular, the share certificate, the quarterly appraisal. The transaction documents are laid flat beneath a projected pyramid built to the specifications of Drbal's patent.

Installed under the apex, the paperwork enters the pyramid's jurisdiction. Each exhibition accrues to the share a further deposit of institutional attention, and the pyramid, which Drbal held, would preserve a razor blade through proportion alone, may by the same undemonstrated principle be said to accelerate the share beneath it.

Playback

Adhesive Phototex canvas, crumpled backing paper, continuous processed audio playback, rolling ladder, air purifier, bubble level, artificial beam

2025

Note: The postcard was produced following a two-month Playback operation at Yale University and was sent to the School of Art.

In 1489, Marsilio Ficino, a physician's son and the most consequential translator of Plato in the Latin West, published his Three Books on Life, the third of which bore the title De Vita Coelitus Comparanda, "On Obtaining Life from the Heavens." The work proposed that the health of the scholar, a figure Ficino considered constitutionally prone to the cold dry influence of Saturn and therefore to melancholy, could be restored through the careful regulation of what Galenic medicine called the six non-natural things: air, diet, sleep, exercise, evacuations, and the passions of the soul. Ficino's innovation was to submit these categories to a Neoplatonic cosmology in which substances, sounds, colors, and odors did not merely affect the body mechanically but attracted the spiritus of specific planets into the material environment, re-tuning the space around the patient as one would re-tune an instrument. The room itself became the therapeutic apparatus. The physician's task was not to administer a drug but to adjust the air.

Nearly five centuries later, in the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs walked through Soho with a portable cassette recorder under his coat, taping the ambient sound of buildings he wished to destroy. The procedure, which he described in his 1970 essay The Electronic Revolution, worked through a three-part model. Tape recorder 1 was the target in its original condition. Tape recorder 2 captured a recording of the target, which, once made, became autonomous, a severed double now outside the target's control. Tape recorder 3 was playback. The recording was spliced with trouble noises and played back at the building, feeding it its own sound in degraded and hostile form. Burroughs reported that this simple operation, carried out against the Moka Bar at 29 Frith Street beginning on August 3, 1972, resulted in declining business, shorter hours, and eventual closure. The effect, as Cabell McLean later put it, was subtle but cumulative, tending to multiply the negative aspects of the target far beyond the target's ability to control them. Burroughs called the technique playback.

Both procedures treat an enclosed space as a body susceptible to re-arrangement through its own sensible output. In Ficino's schema, the room's humoral balance is adjusted by modifying the qualities of light, air, and sound that pass through it. In Burroughs's, the building's recorded voice is turned against it, its acoustic signature played back as a weapon. The first operation heals. The second curses. The instrument in both cases is the medium of the room itself.

Playback inverts Burroughs's operation and submits it to Ficino's. The site of this project is a sick building, a structure whose HVAC system produces the persistent, low-grade symptoms that building science since the 1980s has classified under the diagnosis of Sick Building Syndrome: headaches, fatigue, respiratory irritation, complaints that attach to no single cause and that disappear when the occupant leaves. A microprocessor installed inside the ductwork performs continuous spectral analysis of the system's output, treating mechanical circulation not as background noise but as a low-level vocal apparatus, a distributed source of sound without a stable speaker. The system maps frequency peaks onto the formant structure of the five cardinal vowels and plays the detected vowels back into the duct.

Each day, the proportional frequency of the five vowels over the preceding night is translated into colored squares using the correspondences established in Arthur Rimbaud's 1871 sonnet Voyelles, A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, their dimensions scaled to the frequency of each vowel over time. The squares are printed on adhesive canvas and installed across the walls of the building, so that the surface of the room becomes a cumulative record of its own acoustic profile, recalculated and reinstalled daily as the system re-indexes itself. The building is not repaired. It is not silenced. Its dyscrasia is diagnosed through its own breath, and its treatment is applied directly to its skin.

Order of Sweetness (with Tobias Putrih)

Perforated aluminum panel, inkjet print on glossy photo paper

2024

Cukrarna museum takes its name from sugar. Raised on the bank of the Ljubljanica in 1828 and soon the largest refinery in the Habsburg lands, it was from the first an engine of transmutation, coaxing raw cane through fire and filtration into the white crystalline order Europe had lately decided it could not live without, the marshalling of formless syrup into lattice. That labor ended on the twenty-fifth of August, 1858, when the six-story building burned for six days and the substance it had spent three decades crystallizing ran molten into the river, so that the Ljubljanica, by more than one account, flowed black and sweet for days. The refinery's last act inverted its first. Order dissolved; the sugar returned to the water.

The shell that survived passed through humbler offices, tobacco works, textile plant, barracks, before subsiding into a tenement for the dispossessed. Among its lodgers at the turn of the century were the poets Dragotin Kette and Josip Murn, who died of consumption in the same damp rooms within two years of one another, aged twenty-three and twenty-two, and who would in time be refined, like everything else that passed through the building, into the fixed and durable order of a national modernist canon. Cukrarna had no literary vocation. It was a machine for turning one kind of matter into another.

To compel a fugitive thing into a mark that outlasts it is an old and obstinate ambition, and two of its stranger episodes preside over the project installed in Cukrarna. In the 1640s the astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli let clay spheres fall from the crown of the Torre degli Asinelli in Bologna, again and again, before colleagues assembled to bear witness. His difficulty was time. A descent of three hundred feet is over in four seconds, too swift for the eye to parcel, and so he made time audible, tuning a pendulum to the nightly passage of a star and setting a choir of monks to chant in measure with its swing, until the mute plummet of a stone could be counted as a phrase of sung beats. He had climbed to confirm Galileo's doctrine that bodies of unequal weight fall at equal speed; he descended having overturned it, having watched the heavier sphere burst on the pavement while its lighter twin still hung fifteen feet above the ground. The experiment yielded not equivalence but its refutation, set down twice, as a tally of voices and a constellation of broken clay.

Order of Sweetness opens upon a fall of exactly this kind. The white perforated panels that carry the installation's weight, tuned in hue to the refinery's renovated skin, were drawn by no hand but bred from a simulation of their release from 2,864 meters, the elevation of Triglav, the summit at the heart of the national arms. They shatter upon their imagined impact according to the reckoned physics of the fall, and the fragments, each shaped by the accident of its own landing, are gathered into the lattice that upholds everything else. As on the tower, the fall is staged to leave a residue, and the residue is made to bear the load.

A century later, Louis-Bertrand Castel set himself the converse labor, a clavecin pour les yeux, a harpsichord for the eyes, in which sixty panes of tinted glass would be unveiled at each stroke of a key, so that a melody might play as a procession of colors and a deaf man sit through a concert by sight alone. The contrivance was built, visited by Telemann, and abandoned as unworkable, but its premise outlived it: the accord between a tone and a hue, Castel held, was no convention of his devising but an order laid into creation from the beginning, awaiting only the instrument to make it visible. To translate music into color was not an invention but a revelation.

The installation's second movement keeps that faith. Three blurred archival photographs of Cukrarna lie strewn with points of color, each the value into which a single word of Murn's verse has resolved, for the apparatus gathers, for every word, the images the world has pinned to it across the internet and distills their average tincture, so that a word's color becomes the sediment of every picture ever filed beneath it. Three poems dissolve in this manner, Sneg (Snow), Zvezde (Stars), and Nebo, nebo (Sky, Sky), each surviving only as a drift of color over the house in which its maker died.

Epitaxy

PLA, googly eyes, inkjet print on adhesive paper

2024

For the alchemists, metals were not inert. They were alive, and they grew. Following Aristotle, who held that the moist exhalations of the earth gave them birth, the philosophers believed that ores ripened slowly in the womb of the ground, maturing across centuries from the base toward the noble, lead laboring by degrees toward the condition of gold, since, as Meister Eckhart put it, copper is restless until it becomes gold. The alchemist was a kind of gardener, charged not with manufacturing the precious metal but with hastening a ripening already underway, assisting the fruit that nature had been prevented from bringing to term. The instrument of that haste was the Great Work, the Magnum Opus, which carried the formless prima materia through a succession of stages legible as color, the blackening of nigredo in which the matter putrefied and died, the whitening of albedo in which it was washed of its impurity, the yellowing of citrinitas in which it ripened toward the solar, and at last the reddening of rubedo, the crystallization of the whole, which signaled that the work was finished and the transmutation at an end. What the red announced was the philosopher's stone, and the stone, in the doctrine, was a seed, the seed of all metals, a fragment of which, cast upon a quantity of molten base metal, would propagate its own perfected order through the mass and carry it over into gold. To make the stone was to make a seed from which noble matter would grow in its own image, without limit, multiplied forever.

This is, very nearly to the letter, the science now called epitaxy. The word joins the Greek epi, upon, to taxis, an ordered arrangement, and names the growth of a crystal upon a crystalline substrate that acts as its seed, dictating the orientation of every layer raised upon it, so that the new material inherits and extends the order of the old. It is the method by which single crystals of silicon are grown for the wafers of integrated circuits, which is to say that the alchemical dream of growing noble matter from a seed was never abandoned but realized, and realized precisely in the manufacture of the crystalline ground on which computation itself is built. The deposited layer takes the form the substrate decrees, rising upon it in ordered registry, exactly as the alchemist's gold was meant to take the form decreed by the seed of the stone. Even the printer that builds a body by fusing it layer upon layer performs a version of the same rite, a modern coagula, ordered matter accreted from below.

There is an older art of finding a form in a scatter of points, and it too belonged to this cosmos. Long before the graph, the eye had cast the figures of animals across the random distribution of the stars, the ram and the bull, the lion, the scorpion, and the fishes, reading a bestiary into noise and binding the beasts into the governing wheel of the zodiac. Alchemy was an astral science before it was anything else, holding the seven metals to answer to the seven planets and the ripening of ore beneath the ground to be ruled by the lights above it, as above, so below. To detect an animal latent in a field of scattered data and to grow it toward the red is therefore no arbitrary conjunction. It is to conduct the Work under the sign of the beasts read into the heavens, the very beasts beneath whose governance the metals were thought to mature.

The graphs the series reads are drawn from the Spin Dynamics Laboratory at MIT, the group of Geoffrey Beach, which engineers nanoscale magnetic materials toward a coming generation of spin-based memory and computation. Reconstructed by x-ray holography and microscopy at synchrotron facilities, the images record the behavior of magnetic skyrmions, topologically protected knots of spin that nucleate out of thermal fluctuation, persist as stable particle-like objects within the film, and can be driven across it by current until they reach an edge and are annihilated. These are not figures for the seed and the stone. They are the thing itself in its present form. A skyrmion is a noble form crystallized out of chaos and held against dissolution by its own topology, born within an ordered magnetic multilayer raised layer upon layer, which is to say grown by the very logic the title names, and engineered to carry a single bit in the substrate of the computation to come. The laboratory's plates, panels of distorted bubble-domains each topologically equivalent to a skyrmion, are exactly a field of forms emergent from a turbulent ground, the contemporary massa confusa, and so an exceptional matter upon which to read the figures of animals and to perform, once more, the growing of a noble form from a seed.

Upon these graphs, the Epitaxy series turns a custom object-detection algorithm, made to find the animal figures concealed within the spin textures, a mechanized constellation-drawing, the pattern-finding of the diviner conducted now by the machine. The figures it recovers are extruded by particle-system techniques that simulate, in their stages, the operations of the Magnum Opus, the matter driven from its blackening through its whitening toward its reddening, and the resulting forms are 3D printed, grown layer upon layer in the additive manner that is itself a crystallization, then set against an image of rubedo, the red that in the old doctrine signaled the success of the work and the close of the transmutation.

The series thus grows animals out of the data of the spin as the stone was held to grow gold out of lead, by seeding an ordered form and letting the substrate carry it through. It runs the alchemical dream of seeded growth upon the very materials now being built to store and to compute, the magnetic crystal that is that dream made good, and it ripens, layer by layer, into the red of completion the figures of beasts it has read out of fields where stable forms are already nucleating from chaos, the same beasts the old science first read into the sky and set to govern the slow maturing of metals underground. The philosopher's stone was always a seed crystal, a noble particle held by its own order against decay. The skyrmion is one such particle that physics has lately learned to grow, and epitaxy is the name for the growing.

Woodcutter's Axe

Blue plastic shrink wrap, BASIC code printed on a business card

2024

To determine the true nature of a metal is among the oldest operations of practical knowledge, and its oldest instrument was a stone. The touchstone, the black Lydian stone the Greeks called basanos, returned a streak when gold was drawn across it, and the color of that streak betrayed how much gold the gold in fact contained. The same word, basanos, came in time to name the testing of a person, the close examination, the ordeal, even the torture by which a truth is forced into the open, so that the stone which tried metal lent its name to the trying of men. The art reached its height in the sixteenth century, in the hands of men like Lazarus Ercker, assay master to the mint at Kutná Hora and chief inspector of mines to the alchemy-haunted court of Rudolf II, whose treatise of 1574 stands as the great Renaissance book of the assay. Ercker weighed his silver in a balance fine enough to register a breath, parted gold from silver in a nitric acid that dissolved the base and spared the noble, and took for the motto on his new coat of arms the whole of his science in four words, Erst prob's dann lob's, test it first, then praise it. To assay a substance and to assay a soul were, in the word and in the work alike, a single act, and the question they shared never changed, whether the thing before you was as good as it appeared.

The fable of the woodcutter is that assay told as a story. In the version catalogued as the hundred and seventy-third of Aesop, a poor man drops his only axe into a deep pool and sits weeping, and the god Mercury dives for it, surfacing first with an axe of gold, which the man refuses because it is not his, then with one of silver, refused again, and at last with his own of plain iron, which he claims, and is rewarded for his honesty with all three; a neighbor who stages the same accident and swears the golden axe is his is sent home stripped of everything, kept even from his own. The three metals are an assay whose true object is the man, and they are the three that Plato had lodged in the soul itself, gold in those fit to rule, silver in their helpers, iron in the rest, so that the honest woodcutter proves the gold of his soul in the only way that metal can be proved, by refusing the gold of the water. The trial, as it happens, is conducted by immersion, the axe and the man alike given over to the pool to see what each will do there.

The early-modern world ran this same test on the soul, and ran it in water. Where a woman was suspected of witchcraft she was cross-bound, right thumb to left toe, and let down into a pond, on a doctrine King James set out in his Daemonologie of 1597, that water, the element of baptism, would refuse to take into its bosom anyone who had cast off her baptism, and would hold her up. To float was to be found guilty; to sink was to be cleared, drowned or not. Matthew Hopkins, who styled himself Witchfinder General and swam the accused across East Anglia in the 1640s, cited the king's book for his authority. It was an assay by immersion exactly like the assayer's, save that the matter under test was a person and the dross that rose to the surface was held to be her soul; the false declared itself, as in the crucible, by coming to the top. And the test, like the work that follows from it, consumed its subject either way, the one who floated carried off to the gallows, the one who sank already at the bottom.

The work conducts its assay as a draw of chance, and the chance is of a modern and suspect kind. Printed on the business card sealed inside the piece is a single line of BASIC, 0 IF RND(1)<1/3 THEN NEW, which on each run calls RND for a number between zero and one and, one time in three, executes NEW, the command that empties the program from memory and leaves nothing behind. RND consults no fortune. It computes, by fixed arithmetic, a number that merely behaves as though random, the pseudo-random that John von Neumann said left anyone who made it by such means in a state of sin, there being, as he put it, no such thing as a random number, only methods to produce one, and a strict arithmetic procedure is not among them. The lot is a determinate operation costumed as chance, much as the meeting at the pool was a rigged trial of character wearing the dress of luck, and the swimming of a witch a verdict already reached wearing the dress of an ordeal. The metal each holder draws appears to fall to him by fortune and is settled, in fact, from within.

The thing that administers the test is Woodcutter's Axe, a hollow axe some thirty-two inches long, a skin of blue plastic shrink wrap drawn over the printed card and a zip tie, the wrapping and the fastening of commerce shaped into the laborer's tool, and depending on the hand that holds it the axe is gold, or silver, or plain iron for the cutting of wood. The value was never in the axe, which is hollow and worth nothing, but in the holder and the draw, as the touchstone found nothing in the stone and everything in the streak, as the accused woman's truth was held to lie not in her body but in what the water did with it. The card carries the rule of the assay, and the rule reserves, one time in three, the verdict of NEW, the empty result, the sample consumed in its own testing the way the parting acid eats the base metal away, the holder sent off with less than he came with. Ercker's motto ran, test it first, then praise it. Here the thing is praised before it is tested, drawn as gold in the hand that holds it, and the testing is left to a number that only pretends to chance, and that, one time in three, declines to answer at all.

Barrow

Multiphoton lithography print, metal substrate holder, plastic lab vial

2023

Among the patents registered with the Iran National Science Foundation is one that does not behave like the others. The image attached to it has the quality of a photographic hoax, or of a montage assembled to illustrate some manifesto: a man stands at a podium beside his invention, and the invention is a wheelbarrow, and the wheelbarrow is the smallest in the world. The scale is the entire content. There is almost no accompanying text, no account of what the object is for, no claim of utility beyond the single superlative, and the eye, given nothing to hold, slides off the thing entirely, unable to settle on whether it is looking at a tool, a model of a tool, or a joke about both. By every available document, it is a real patent for a real object that does nothing.

The wheelbarrow is among the oldest implements in the catalog of useful things, a machine reducible to a wheel, a lever, and a load, the elementary apparatus by which a body multiplies what it can carry. To render it at a scale at which it can carry nothing is therefore not a refinement of the tool but its cancellation, and the gesture has a longer pedigree than the patent admits.

In 1881 Nikolai Leskov published the tale of a cross-eyed gunsmith from Tula who, challenged to outdo a clockwork steel flea built by English engineers, a flea so small it could be made out only through what the story's narrator calls a nitroscope, and which, properly wound, would dance, shut himself away with two companions and, working without any magnification at all, forged horseshoes small enough to fit each of the flea's feet, nailed them on, and engraved each shoe with its maker's name. The feat was genuine and the demonstration total. Russian craft had bested English craft below the threshold of the visible. It had also made the flea too heavy to dance. The one function the object possessed was the cost of the proof. Skill carried to its terminal point consumed the thing it was meant to celebrate.

The appetite for smallness as an end in itself acquired, in the following century, an institutional form. Closing a lecture at Caltech in 1959, the talk now treated as the founding document of nanotechnology, Richard Feynman offered a thousand dollars to the first person to build an electric motor smaller than a sixty-fourth of an inch on a side, in the confident expectation that no existing method could manage it and that the prize would force the invention of new ones. He had not set the money aside; he assumed the achievement lay years away. Within the year a Caltech engineer named William McLellan arrived with a working motor he had assembled by hand on his lunch breaks, using conventional tools and a watchmaker's patience, carried in a box so large that Feynman at first refused to believe it could hold anything that qualified. The motor satisfied every term of the challenge and advanced nothing; it used no technique that had not already existed. Its coils later burned out, and it came to rest in a niche in a corridor, a functioning object that had ceased to function, kept for the single fact of its size.

The work proceeds from the premise that the only fitting reply to a patent for the smallest wheelbarrow is a smaller one. Its instrument is a compact multiphoton lithography device, not yet released commercially, of the kind used to fabricate micro-optics, the moving parts of microrobots, and the needle arrays of transdermal drug delivery. The apparatus focuses a pulsed laser into a bath of liquid resin; because hardening occurs only where two photons arrive together with enough concentrated intensity, polymerization is confined to the single voxel at the focal point, and a three-dimensional form is written into the liquid point by point, the unexposed resin is washed away afterward with solvent. Feature sizes reach a hundred nanometers. Into this machine, built to manufacture the working infrastructure of the very small, the project submits the design of a wheelbarrow, anatomically complete, with its wheel, its legs, its handles, and its tray, at a scale finer than the patented object by orders of magnitude, and finer than any purpose could survive.

What results is a tool fabricated by the most advanced means available and rendered, by those same means, more comprehensively useless than the patented one it answers. Feynman's prize asked miniaturization to yield a new technique and was answered with old craft; this work asks the newest technique to yield nothing, and is answered exactly. Leskov's craftsmen subtracted a flea's lone function in the act of proving their virtuosity; here, the loss of function is not an accident of the demonstration but its whole object. The wheelbarrow, the emblem of the load made bearable, is reproduced at a size at which there is no load, no bearer, and nothing to carry, visible only through the instrument that made it, hauling nothing across a field that cannot exist.

Dowsing

Rebar, striped barricade tape

Archival ink on graph paper, color instant film print, file folder

2023

The art of finding what lies underground by walking over it with a forked stick is old enough to have earned, in the American vernacular, the name doodlebugging. In De Re Metallica, the 1556 treatise that would govern European mining for the next two centuries, Georgius Agricola set the practice down in detail, the miners who cut a fork of hazel for veins of silver, of ash for copper, of pitch pine for tin, and walked the ground with the branches clenched in their fists until the joined end dipped of its own accord toward the hidden lode. Agricola himself doubted it, tracing the rod back to the wands of Circe and Mercury and concluding that an honest miner had no need of incantation. A century later, in the lead hills of Somerset, Robert Boyle watched a diviner's rod stoop in his hands while the man swore he exerted no force upon it, and Boyle, persuaded of the man's sincerity and of nothing further, set down the perplexity at the center of the art, that the rod moves, that the hand believes it does not, and that the signal taken for a message from the depths in fact originates in the involuntary muscles of the body gripping the stick. The diviner reads the buried and is himself the source of the reading.

What Boyle had glimpsed as a scandal in a later century would formalize as a discipline. In 1948, Claude Shannon defined information as the resolution of uncertainty, fixed its unit as the bit, the single distinction between yes and no, and measured the uncertainty of a source as its entropy, the average surprise of the next symbol to arrive. The most consequential move in his theory was a renunciation. The meaning of a message, Shannon held, is irrelevant to the engineering of its transmission; a channel carries signal and noise without regard to truth, and a perfectly formed, maximally informative message may say nothing that is so. A dowser is a receiver on exactly such a channel. The body, in the practitioners' own account, is a pulse-code modulator, sampling the continuous signal of the cosmos and quantizing it into the lone bit the rod is permitted to return, and because a single reading cannot be told apart from chance, the ritual demands replication, the redundancy by which any noisy channel recovers its message from the noise around it. Dowsing and information theory turn out to be the same technology pointed in opposite directions, each a machine for converting uncertainty into certainty, neither under any obligation to make the certainty true.

The one element that owns no veins and conceals nothing underground would seem to lie past all such reading, and it became instead the great object of the modern dream of control. Fourier promised that once humanity composed itself into Harmony the poles would warm and the seas would turn to a kind of lemonade, and he kept his Phalanstery in covered galleries held at one even temperature through every season; Le Corbusier sealed his buildings against the outside air and let them breathe only through machines, holding a single ideal climate against every latitude on earth; John Jacob Astor IV conjured rain from aeriducts in his scientific romance, and Buckminster Fuller proposed to roof midtown Manhattan beneath a two-mile dome and govern the weather under it. Yves Klein carried the dream to its end and, in carrying it there, gave away its mechanism. With the architect Werner Ruhnau, he drew an architecture of air, a paradise of open space walled by curtains of blown air and roofed by nothing, an Eden in which human beings, relieved of walls, would be free to pursue their own interests. What the drawings declined to show, because the entire point was that it never be shown, was the plant required to produce the miracle, the pumps and compressors and turbines buried below ground so that the air at the surface might appear weightless and unconditioned. The free sky was the visible face of an interred machine, exactly as the dowser's reading was the visible face of his own hand.

The Dowsing series turns the forked rod away from buried silver and toward this buried machine, doodlebugging not for water or ore but for the ductwork that manufactures the air. The data were gathered through the American Society of Dowsers, the nonprofit founded in Danville, Vermont in 1961 that has issued the quarterly American Dowser since 1964; nine of its expert members were recruited and their dowsing recorded as physiology and terrain at once, the heart rate and velocity and involuntary motions of the body set against the elevation of the ground beneath it and the shifting of the earth's magnetic field, the last drawn from the magnetometer logs of the Anchorage Radio Observatory in Alaska. The instrument built to dowse alongside them was a bobber hung from a wand inscribed in the Theban alphabet, the occult script set down in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and later taken up within Wicca, and since a divination of any seriousness asks an offering, a banana was sacrificed inside a carboy to charge it.

The series assembles a probabilistic model of the dowsing process, built not to forecast anything truly but to grow a design from the priors the ritual supplies. Its vocabulary is the glossary of HVAC, out of which it composes the strings it casts as spells, and its field of play is a matrix holding every possible configuration of the system's parts. At each move the model weighs by Bayesian posterior how effective each spell would be, measures the uncertainty of every available step as Shannon entropy, advances first into the step of least entropy and so of greatest certainty, settles there on the likeliest spell, fixes the part now chosen, and repeats until the whole scheme is specified, manufacturing a fully determined plan out of probabilistic fog by the same entropy-minimizing logic a communications engineer would recognize. A drawing machine plots the chosen spells onto graph paper, where they resolve into ventilation plans that spell, in their own lettering, the names of the very parts they arrange. The plans are then carried out of the model and onto actual ground, staked at full scale across real sites with lengths of rebar driven in at the vertices and barricade tape strung between them to trace the outline, so that the plan of an interred machine surfaces in the open as a cordon, the divined silhouette of the air's apparatus pegged to the earth the dowser walked. From the same plans come three-dimensional models, from the models renderings, from the renderings polaroid photographs of rooms that were never built, the whole sequence gathered into a folder. None of its issues stems from the cosmos it petitions. It issues from the glossary fed to the model and the bodily data of the diviners, the involuntary muscle Boyle could not credit promoted at last from secret to measured variable.

So the rod stoops once more over a hidden depth, and the depth answers, as it always did, in the diviner's own voice, sampled now and weighted and laid out as a floor plan staked in tape. The procedure leaves standing the question the older anthropology believed it had closed when it filed divination under failed science, which is how the art of the diviner, who studies how one thing signifies another not yet arrived, differs in kind from the art of the architect, who does the same. It offers in its place a fork in the path, the figure of the rod itself, one tine running toward a design forever beyond grasp and the other toward a riddle drawn in code, and at the end of either tine the enclosure is the same. Air, the cipher of every freedom precisely because it could be neither owned nor walled, is brought indoors at the instant its machinery descends underground, the Eden of open air disclosed as the ceiling of a bunker, the forked stick dipping faithfully toward a vein that was always the hand.

Stone Tape

Programs in an abstract assembly language called Redcode, laptop computer, directional antenna, milk crates, stones, mylar blanket, wire

2022

In 1837, while at work on the analytical engine, Charles Babbage set down, in an unbidden addition to a series of treatises on natural theology, the proposition that no word ever spoken is truly lost. Sound is a disturbance of the air; the disturbance imparts motion to every particle it meets; and motion, by the mechanics of his day, is never destroyed but only handed onward, attenuating without end. It followed that every syllable ever uttered persists, fainter by the year yet permanently inscribed, in the ceaseless agitation of the atmosphere. The air, he wrote, is one vast library, on whose pages stand for ever written all that man has said and woman whispered, the vows unredeemed and the promises unkept mixed with the latest sighs of the dead. A sufficiently vast intelligence, running the motions backward, might read that library and hear the voices again. Nor did Babbage confine the claim to air. Earth, he added, and the ocean are the eternal witnesses of the acts done upon them. The founder of computation had described the world as a recording, and a recording implies a playback.

His century set about locating the playback in stone. In 1842 the American physician Joseph Rodes Buchanan coined the word psychometry, the measuring of the soul, on the hypothesis that all matter continually emits an emanation that fixes within it a record of every event and feeling that has passed nearby; the electrometer, he said, measures electric conditions, and the psychometer measures the soul. The doctrine found its fullest instrument in William Denton, a geologist lecturing in Boston, whose Soul of Things (1863) reported that a mineral or a fossil pressed to the forehead of a sensitive would discharge its stored impressions as vision, the specimen replaying the scenes it had witnessed across geological time. Nature, Denton wrote, has been photographing every moment since the first dawn of light upon the globe, and her picture gallery is the rock itself. A glacial pebble, a fragment of Cicero's villa, a chip of hornstone from the Mount of Olives, each was held to be a loaded plate awaiting development. The haunted house, in this account, was not supernatural at all. It was a recording medium, and the ghost was the data it held.

The work takes this inheritance and runs it on the machine Babbage began. At its center is an anthropophagic rite conducted inside the memory of a computer, a contest between cannibal programs written in an abstract assembly language and set loose within a single circular field of RAM, the core whose name still carries the iron rings of an older memory. Loaded blind, neither knowing where the other lies, the programs take turns executing one instruction apiece, each seeking to overwrite the other's code with unexecutable matter until one is consumed entirely and the survivor runs alone. A monitor presides over the feast, alternating between a graphical display of the devouring and a starkly abstracted textual readout of the simulation's interior state. A single contest may run from minutes to hours, and ends only at total consumption, when one body has wholly eaten the other.

What the loser leaves behind is not permitted to vanish. The residual data of the terminated program, its core dump, its digital ghost, is gathered and transmitted by a directional antenna into a crate built after the manner of Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulators, its interior packed with carefully chosen stones that receive the signal and hold it. When the transfer is complete the charged stones are removed to black crates, each crate keeping the recording of one dead cannibal. The procedure is the literal execution of the nineteenth century's dream. Babbage's engine, grown into the programs that are its descendants, now writes the dead onto rock, and Denton's loaded mineral receives an impression no longer metaphorical, a body of data deposited by antenna into the waiting stone.

That stone should take the imprint of a vanished body would not have surprised Ovid, in whose Metamorphoses the boundary between the mineral and the living is not a wall but a current along which all things pass. There Pyrrha casts stones over her shoulder after the flood and watches them soften into human limbs, and there Niobe, emptied by grief, hardens into marble that goes on weeping. The cannibal programs are border-crossers of the same kind, passing at their death from the executable into the inert, from the metaphysical body of running code into the physical body of charged rock, and in the crossing they dissolve the line between the two. What the work sets before the viewer, in its crates of humming stone and its monitor of digital cannibalism, is the physical makeup of the present condition laid bare, its algebra, its vertigo, and its order, and with it the disquieting recognition that the founder of the computer had already described the haunting his machines would one day be built to perform.

Thunderer

Ciphered engravings on a whistle, motorized cork pea, custom electronics, camera

2022

The referee's whistle settles a match by the rattling of a small loose body in a chamber. Blow through a pea whistle and the airstream, striking the sharp lip inside, raises a tone; the light cork pellet sealed in the chamber is then caught in that same stream and flung in circles, choking the air and unsettling the note at uneven intervals, so that a steady pitch is broken into the warble no human voice could sustain and no crowd could miss. Joseph Hudson, a Birmingham toolmaker, arrived at the design in 1883 while searching for a sound to replace the wooden rattles the London police still carried, and the sound reached him by accident, in the harsh dying chord his violin let out when it slid from a table and broke on the floor. The next year, he fixed it in brass, dropped a single cork pea into the chamber, and called the instrument the Acme Thunderer. Referees, who until then had signaled their rulings by waving a handkerchief, took it up as the impartial voice of the game, the one sound that starts play, halts it, and pronounces on all that occurs in between, and before which the players bow without appeal. Hudson appears not to have dwelt on the name. The Thunderer is the eldest of the sky-god's titles, the one whose judgment arrives as a peal of thunder, so that the referee was handed the voice of judgment itself, and a chip of cork to set it speaking.

That a verdict should hang on the tumbling of a small body in a chamber is older than the whistle by some thousands of years. The cast lot is the most ancient of all instruments for reaching a decision, trusted for the very reason a tossed pellet is unpredictable, that no interested party could bend it; to cast lots was to refer a matter past human partiality, to the gods or to chance, on the understanding, as the proverb has it, that the lot is thrown into the lap but the whole of its judgment comes from elsewhere. The Athenians, who held that a judge could be bribed and a crowd could not, built the principle into a machine, the kleroterion, a slab of stone slotted with the citizens' bronze tickets, down whose side ran a tube of black and white balls released one at a time by a crank, each ball sending a whole row of men to the jury or home, so that those who would judge the day's trials were chosen by nothing but the fall of the lot. And yet, as long as there have been lots, there have been loaded ones, the die quietly weighted to land as its owner wishes, examples of which survive from antiquity, the oracle compelled to speak to order. The impartial instrument and the rigging of it are equally old.

Why a game in particular should draw such rigging is a question the anthropology of magic settled long ago. Malinowski, among the Trobrianders, found that they fished the safe inner lagoon by skill alone and saved their magic for the open sea, where the catch was great and the danger real and the outcome past controlling, and concluded that magic takes root precisely where technique runs out, in the margin of any undertaking that belongs to chance. A football match is mostly that margin. The training is technique; the ninety minutes are the open sea. Into them the clubs send their rammals, on the premise the Thunderer series takes for its start, that the ledgers of Iranian football, through the first division and the second and the third, carry fees for ramali, the casting that reads a match before it is played, and for jadoogari, the sorcery retained to bend it, to fold a defender's knee at the decisive instant or turn a certain goal off the bar. Such a spell does not claim the defender cannot slip; it claims to fix that he slips now, and against this side, which is, in the sense Evans-Pritchard drew from the Azande and their poison oracle, an account not of how a thing is possible but of why it befalls this man at this moment, a hand laid on the particular. And in laying that hand it offends the one rule that makes a game a game, the rule Lévi-Strauss named when he set the game, which begins with two sides made equal and ends, through fair play, in a winner, against the rite, which begins with the sides unequal, gods over men, and labors by sacrifice to bring them level. To buy a spell is to pull the game back toward the rite, to settle the inequality beforehand and call the result a sacrifice.

What the spell wants, it wants by the route that would one day yield the machine. The behavior of the lot, having for so long belonged to the gods, passed in time into number, when Cardano, physician and astrologer and unrepentant gambler, first wrote down the odds of the throw, and from number into computation, where a throw can be modeled and, with enough of the right data, foreseen. The continuity is not incidental. Magic, Mauss held, is not the opposite of technique but its mother, the first practice of acting upon the world at a distance and with certainty, out of which the disciplined techniques and the sciences slowly precipitate, alchemy leaving chemistry behind it and astrology astronomy; the sorcerer who wants the ball off the bar and the engineer who wants the bridge to stand are after the same thing, efficacy, and part only over whether the world complies. What the modern object adds is the look of compliance. An art object, Gell argued, works as a technology of enchantment, casting its spell less through what it plainly is than through the idea one forms of its uncanny coming into being, and a machine whose workings are half-hidden is enchanted in precisely that way. Magic, the oracle, and the machine are three forms of a single wish, to reduce the contingency of the world, and the Thunderer series gives that wish a working body.

It loads the one lot that already sits inside the game's instrument of judgment, on behalf of a single club, Rah Ahan of Tehran, the railway, founded in 1927 by the state line and crewed at first by men from the engine sheds, and carried for one early season under the name Pirouz, meaning the victor. The Thunderer is taken apart and the cork pellet left in place but seated on a motor; the motor answers to a small controller, and the controller carries a model trained on the club's entire surviving record, the tracked paths of players and ball and the timing of every pass and foul and shot, from which it has learned the shape a match takes in the seconds before it turns. A camera feeds it the live game; it runs the unfolding play against all it has seen of the club's past and waits for the configuration it reads as decisive, and at that instant a concealed blower opens onto the chamber while the motor drives the cork ball spinning in the forced stream, so that the whistle cries of its own accord, at the one moment the data say will weigh most, and gives it to Rah Ahan. The pellet was the instrument's one concession to chance, the body whose rattle no one could foretell, and the motor beneath it, taking its orders from the club's own history, makes of that last free thing the most governed part of the mechanism, a lot made to fall on command. And the conceit shuts on a single odd fact, that the whistle the referee raises to his mouth is, down to the cork, the same whistle a railway guard blows to send a train out of the station, so that the instrument is lifted from the neutral ground of the game and handed back, like a confiscated thing returned to its owner, to the railway's own eleven.

The whistle named for the Thunderer is thereby drawn out of the impartial god's mouth and made to thunder for one side, the lot of the game loaded, its last trace of chance turned over to a motor, its verdict fixed before the players take the field. Against the old certainty that they are mortal to the last man and will every one be brought level in the end, the work sets a flat refusal to be brought level at all, of the kind the American coach Vince Lombardi pressed into a proverb when he said that winning is not everything, that it is the only thing. The cork turns on its motor, the broken note that began its life in a falling violin gathers and climbs the pipe, and when the voice of judgment sounds out across the ground, it calls for Rah Ahan.

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Golem

Ceramic tablets with imprints of the computer's Control Key

2022

A golem is a figure of earth, quickened by letters. The book that first taught the art, the Sefer Yetzirah or Book of Creation, held that God had made the world itself along thirty-two paths of wisdom, the ten primal numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are the building-stones of all that is; and the makers of golems did in little what he had done in full, taking clay as he had taken the dust for Adam and animating it not with breath but with the right combinations of letters. The word of power was cut across the creature's forehead, most often emet, truth, of which it was said that to wipe away its first letter, the silent aleph, left met, dead, so that the whole of its life turned on a single sign. Speech was the one thing it could not be given, and in the end it was always returned to its dust, the most famous of them on the Sabbath the rabbi of Prague forgot to lift the word away and the thing ran amok through the ghetto.

The notion that a world might be spun from the combination of a few fixed signs did not stay the property of mystics. It takes its strangest modern form in Leibniz, who as a young man dreamed in his De Arte Combinatoria of 1666 of an alphabet of human thought, a set of primitive characters whose combinations would yield every truth there is and reduce all reasoning to a sort of arithmetic, and who later worked out the arithmetic of base two and saw in it nothing less than a picture of the Creation. One suffices to derive all out of nothing, he wrote, delighted, reading the 1 as God and the 0 as the void, and the generation of every number from those two marks as the drawing of all things from unity and emptiness, an imago creationis. The binary that would one day quicken the machine was, in the mind that devised it, already a creation story, a making of the world from a single stroke and a void, which is to say from very nearly the materials of the golem, a word and some dust.

By the middle of the twentieth century the resemblance had grown literal enough to name. When the Weizmann Institute completed one of its first computers, it was Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern study of Kabbalah, who proposed it be called Golem, and who at the dedication on a June day in 1965 rose to explain why. The old golem, he said, was built on the mystical combination of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, the building-stones of the world; the new one ran on a system at once simpler and more intricate, knowing only two signs, the 0 and the 1, and the old Kabbalists, he added dryly, would have been proud. He noted as well what the new creature shared with the old in its poverty, that neither could be granted speech or reason, the very faculties that keep a creature short of its maker. The darker reading of the kinship belongs to Norbert Wiener, who had named the science of control cybernetics, after the Greek word for the steersman, and who in his last book, God and Golem, Inc., published in the year of his death, came back to the clay creature in earnest. Wiener had emerged from the war persuaded that his science had helped arm the world, and that in crossing the boundary between organism and machine it had begun to resemble the building of golems. He set the figure among his other parables of the literal-minded servant, the broom of the Sorcerer's Apprentice that would not stop hauling water, the genie loosed from the bottle, the Monkey's Paw whose wish for two hundred pounds arrives as the compensation paid for a son killed in the factory machinery, in order to state the thing we have since learned to call the control problem. The agencies of magic, he wrote, are literal-minded, and so are machines that learn, granting not what we meant but what we said, and a machine that had lately taught itself to beat its own maker at checkers, and that acts faster than a man can think, will not pause for him to reconsider. If we build a machine to win a war, Wiener warned, we had better know precisely what we mean by winning.

The Golem series takes that doubled creature at its word. Into slabs of wet clay is pressed the shape of a single key from a computer's keyboard, the Control key, and the slabs are fired hard, so that each carries in baked earth a socket the exact size of the thing that will quicken it, in the place where a maker of golems would have set the name. A slab comes alive when the right Control key is seated in its impression and goes dead when the key is drawn out, which is the identical gesture, slowed almost to ritual, of cutting emet into a brow and rubbing the aleph away. Everything turns on the choice of that key. The golem of Prague was raised on the word for truth; this creature is raised on Control, the key that prints no letter and means nothing on its own, that exists only to bend the others to command, the modifier by which the whole machine is steered. Its name gathers into a single English word the oldest fear in the golem story, the servant and the dread of losing hold of it, and the founding term of Wiener's science, the steersman's art of control. The operation is called an accelerated computerogenesis, the long labor of the golem and the instant boot of the machine folded into one motion of the hand.

What the piece quietly stages is a substitution. The creature of Prague lived on the word truth and died when the truth was broken; this one lives on Control, and the principle of its animation has shifted accordingly, from the sign that means true to the key that means command, from what is the case to what holds the upper hand. And the legend's old anxiety has not been outgrown but wired into the instrument, for the Control key is also the one struck together with Alt and Delete to halt a machine that will not obey and begin it again, the steersman's last snatch at a tiller the story always promised would slip his grip. The clay lies on the table as inert as any potsherd until the key is set in its brow, and it minds, for exactly as long as control sits there, and not a moment longer.