Throughout my work, I view the digital medium as a machine of transfiguration: buildings become instruments; videos become physical objects. The transformed digital matter is recast back into its original context, physically manipulated: all part of a live, exposed, distributed, unstable, and absurd process, conducted by the customized tools and software I create. The appearance of deconstruction is elaborately constructed and consumed in real time; it is simultaneously live aesthetic surgery, a cooking show, a visual effects production, a neighborhood map, and a military target.
I have performed and exhibited my work internationally in venues such as Xuzhou Museum of Art in China, Artneuland gallery in Berlin, the Netmage Live Media festival in Bologna, Links Hall and Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, and in many Israeli venues, including several showings at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, the C.Sides International electronic media festival, the Laptopia festival, the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv, The Haifa and Bat Yam Museums and more.
I have received a number of fellowships and awards including most recently being one of five Chicago artists across all mediums to receive the 2010 Edes Foundation Award for Emerging Artists.
I have recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an MFA in Studio Art pursued with full fellowship through the department of Art and Technology Studies.
The fragility of personal experience in our contemporary culture comes into the sharpest focus for me when contrasted with the massively mediated, hyper-transgressive nature of this very culture. How to create understanding, communication of the visceral experience of something as simple as a walk down the street? What it means – on the personal, the political, the sensual level, to break a wall? To cut a body? How to convey the contrast between the visual bombardment of massive architectural facades, grandiose film-worlds that are flat even when observed through colored glasses, and this fragile sense of invisible, underlying layers that constantly surround us: layers of memory, materiality, human identity, bodily sensation, multiple stories. Of course there is no real answer, but for me, the path to possible solutions lies in taking upon myself the role of media manipulator, using and abusing the very tools with which our electronic reality is created, reclaiming them for creative expression, and using them to transform myself, my surroundings and my audience; to expose the multiple layers, connections and points of view surrounding every mundane element and gesture. It is my perhaps naïve belief that perceiving this rich multiplicity is an important catalyst for creating a more humanistic, free-thinking society...
Throughout my work, I view the digital medium as a machine of transfiguration: buildings become instruments; videos become physical objects. The transformed digital matter is recast back into its original context, physically manipulated: all part of a live, exposed, distributed, unstable, and absurd process, conducted by the customized tools and software I create. The appearance of deconstruction is elaborately constructed and consumed in real time; it is simultaneously live aesthetic surgery, a cooking show, a visual effects production, a neighborhood map, and a military target.
This process is evident in my directly gestural, live performance pieces such as “Tunneling”, in which I dug out the images of absurdly flat, multilayered tunnels, seemingly leading from the inside of a space onto the street, where a woman was singing. These were later multiplied, riddling an entire warehouse space in Israel with a live “production line for virtual tunnels” lasting several days. The Tunneling series represents an intersection between my interest in gestures and the layered nature of mediated reality, between visceral interaction with the most basic constituents of a given location; as well as referencing techniques of aggression, control (the IDF tunneling from house to house in Jenin, aerial drone strikes, etc), and conversely- healing and reconstruction (the surgical cut, DIY home repair). Another manifestation of my approach can be found in works that I produce using a performative process, but who then exist independently of this process: In the recent “Strip” I rode a bicycle through Chicago from the southern beginnings of my home street to it's very end in the north suburbs, “scanning” the street-scape and creating a fragmented, “humanized” panorama that expands and contracts- more like a memory or a body than an objective document, with the potential to become a 1:1 borgesian map of the location. This project serves as a starting point for a future series, in which certain lines and arcs in both public and private spaces will be “mapped” using variations on this process- by myself and by others. Both of the above approaches feed into my current work in progress- “Cut Stories”: in this piece the documented “landscape” is made of only people on a set, of their stories about surgeries, accidents and repairs, and of the multi-headed documentation apparatus, which the same participants operate. This performative event is now being reworked into a video installation. I hope to continue developing this approach in related future projects, creating multiple feedback loops between myself and my participants / collaborators. Indeed, collaborative and hybrid practices are a strong point of interest for me, and work with a diverse group of co-creators has contributed much to my development as an artist. Past collaborators included dancers, musicians, programmers, an orchestra, a grind-metal drummer, actors and singers, as well as fellow visual artists.