Our current understanding of technology is dominated by the thought of clever and alluring consumer gadgets, but the ingenuity and utility of our material progress is also much more fundamental: prosthetic ways of extending our bodies and minds. This does not point just to our desire to make life easier, live longer, save lives, or even alleviate suffering; rather, it seems to define the experience of existing in a body, which is a struggle to reconcile the limitations and maintenance of a physical self in the context of the rest of our being. I am interested in how the juxtaposition of body and machine invokes binary dialogues about the biological and artificial, intriguing and mundane, graceful and awkward, refined and ridiculous, foreign and uncanny. Through mechanical references and kinetic configurations, my work explores questions of how even our most basic technologies present themselves as prosthetic means of understanding our physical circumstances.

Binary Self-Portrait (detail)

Clay and glaze, wood, stainless steel, rubber, acrylic

30h x 68w x 36d

2008