extrACT 2011

ExtrACT is a set of tools for communities facing natural gas extraction. A multi-year project conducted at Civic media, the three sites are used to track drilling, record community impacts, and hold companies accountable.

Roboat 2009

Protest unmanned surface vehicle (boat). It takes the form of a waterproof pelican case packed with electronics. With the addition of consumer, off-the-shelf components (a kayak, trolling motor, and battery) the system can maneuver for significant distances and chant voice-synthesized messages Ideal for protesting sites that may be difficult to access by land. Restore habeas corpus!

DJ I, Robot Soundsystem 2001

The world's first robot dj. First prototyped in 1999, it debuted in Berlin at Transmediale 2001. Made with recycled duplication machine motors, tonearms from SL-1200s, and bits of pipe, it was a hightech/lowtech mixture of Frankenstein and Terminator X.

Skin 2004

Full-sized section of a 727 bisecting the Location 1 gallery in Manhattan. Over 6000 rivets, waterjet aluminum panels, vibratory transducers. A reflection on what happens when our extremely complicated systems break down, as they did on 9/11. Only 1/8th inch of Aluminum separates you from a 50,000' fall in no oxygen: this installation allowed you to be on the other side of that thin skin.

Freedom Flies 2004

An unmanned aerial vehicle designed to overfly the Minutemen, a fascistic anti-immigrant group that assaults and intimidates border-crossers. Designed to be easily built out of consumer components, but still able to loft 30lbs for hours at a time. Crashed a lot.

Probots 2009

An unmanned ground vehicle designed to protest outside defense contractors working on -- you guessed it -- unmanned ground vehicles designed to kill people. An open source platform; dozens of devices can be controlled from one station.

Control 2004

Control was a massive control panel -- modeled roughly on the on from Chernobyl -- that did nothing. A response to the instrumentality that surrounded me at MIT, and that I was slowly succumbing to, as well as to an enduring fascination with the role of the control panel in mid-20th Century films, from Alphaville to Dr. No.

Natural Language Processor 2001

Natural Language Processor was a reconstruction of a 1950s experiment in determining the natural or "deep" structure of human language. Human infant subjects were presented with visual stimulus (images of bananas, breasts) and their ensuing vocalizations were recorded. The experiment was shut down due to concerns about developmental damage to the babies, but not before the discovery of over 40 pre-cultural words for milk.

Character Input 1997

Character Input was a Soviet perceptron that was trained on the faces of hundreds of thousands of citizens and their secret NKVD records. Through this training process, the system built models of face and personality that soon allowed it, when presented with the face of a new person, to deduce things about their the character, personality, and life experiences. Parts of the original machine, from 1968, were discovered in a medical museum in Estonia, and the reconstructed device was exhibited in Chicago at ISEA in 1997.

First Airborne / Violent Nature 2008

First Airborne was a reaction to the very literal process of US technology development -- a lot of it at MIT -- by which investigators "carve nature at her joints" and then use the knowledge thus gained to create weapons of destruction. With Ming-Yip Kwong, we 3d laser-scanned maple seeds and then rebuilt them the same size as the JDAM bomb.