Interactive music video, 4 min, 2024. Tin Angel Records.

In "Quieras o no," Mabe Fratti sings of inevitable "desastre"/"disaster"—of a world where, the more you try to hold on, the more you lose control—where understanding itself is violent. The web-based music video offers an interactive landscape where this sense of impenetrable disaster runs amok. "Quieras o no" moves from one phase to another, like truncated opera, and so does the website: one mode of interaction gives way to another that's totally different. Peopled with a mixture of original footage by Gerardo del Valle and gifs found on GifCities.org, this is not a clean Jetsons-like future, but a dirty, cyberpunk one that registers your foot- and fingerprints. The same elements appear at the same moments in the song, no matter what. However, each experience is meaningfully different: the initial gifs appear in random positions and in random sizes, and all elements are draggable, so viewers can arrange them as they wish, like a pile of triggering family photos. Any experience of the site is valid—as long as you keep your sound on, and try dragging everything.

Website, 6 min, 2024. Ghost Proposal.

FRAMING AS IN SHARP is a big fat dirty frenetic pile of gif-frames collected from the farthest entrails of the internet and layered in scroll-induced illogic/mania. When you give the frames attention, they show: poetry, videos of window-frames seen within window-frames (taken from my sickbed), and iframes within iframes. This started as an innocent collection of gif-frames but then all I was thinking about was Palestine; it's called FRAMING AS IN SHARP because I began to see in these frames the cacophonic crowding-in of violent political framing: violence of omission, violence of forced specificity of perspective, violence of the quick/flashy/cheap "internet" (in its current monopolized and casino-ized form) being the distributor of information about such abhorrent anti-human devastation.

Small opera, 12 min, 2023. First screened at Spectacle Theater.

The video includes three asemic operatic songs made with only three materials: my own vocals recorded during Covid lockdown, recordings of whale sounds from the 70s, and ambient sounds incidental to both recordings. The songs are operatic in singing style (I briefly trained in opera, as a kid, with a friend of my grandfather’s) and structure, with the physicality of pop and ecstatic choral harmonies that nod to religion. Subtitles tell a future myth as a dialogue. The videos show myself working out chronic neck pain/headache, along with cropped clips from the Met’s recordings of their opera productions, focusing on women’s necks, shoulders, and chests.

10-webpage hypertext poem, 15 min, 2023. Featured in External Pages.

PRESTIDIGITAL *67 mirrors the ancient hypertextual structure of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which tells the story how life comes out of nothing. All pages include a heavily researched (but original) poem and conflicting web-based spatial illusions, suggesting a pre-existential time. The poems bounce around like screensavers, hitting invisible walls—and are draggable, with attitude. Cropped Youtube clips of urban weeds (another thing that seems to emerge out of nothing) expand on scroll and jump away from the cursor. Each page also includes a tentacle in place of a cursor. It leaves a trace, covered up occasionally and accidentally, as by snow. The weed gifs act as links, but they must choose to allow you to click on them (if you're having trouble, make them bigger.)

Modular poems on a webpage, 15 min, 2023. Published by Crawlspace.cool.

THEO IN BITS THEO HOLDS TAUT contains three poems written in a classic computational poetic form. Beyond itself, this project proposes that computational poetic forms can and should be reused (and stretched/damaged/transformed with reuse) as so many non-computational poetic forms have been. The point of this work is not this poetic form in particular—which has been used in many other projects and uses very old tech—but the poems, all aspects of which I wrote with great care. The form: I write a basic prose frame that remains fixed but has blanks; I write a list of words or phrases corresponding to each blank; when the user scrolls, the browser fills each blank with a word or phrase chosen "randomly" from its list. The form gives little agency to the computer, so I feel full authorship over all iterations (even though I will never see them all). These texts were written through a sad time, and maybe I used the randomization to cut off sentimentality mid-sentence, disrespect it, refuse to let my pain speak clearly. The shuffling gif borders melo-dramatize the shuffling in the poems and reference an earlier internet time: here too is nostalgia, emotion—abstracted, interrupted, cut-up.

Web-based magazine, 2017-20, 2023-present. Featured in Casa Equis, El Quinto Piso, and The Book Fair of Oaxaca.

ORAL.pub publishes poetry/art made for and inseparable from the web, often in translation. I founded ORAL.pub as an excuse to talk about web-based poetry with my friends. I've since directed it, though dozens of others have been vital in making it happen. ORAL.pub aims to publish sites as communication-desperate, sentient, and necessary as mouths… sites spiritually aligned with their medium (the web), which, like oral storytelling and oral sex, fundamentally (in its bones) refuses stable structures of power. The architectures of these sites are themselves meaningful and often defy our internet instincts. Though the website now centers the English language, it was bilingual (English and Spanish) from 2017-2020. Then, Rodrigo Echeverría and I also ran corpORAL, a series of exhibition-parties that translated ORAL.pub sites into the physical world. ORAL.pub sites were then mostly made by/with friends who had never made net art/e-lit/etc., and whom I helped with code or paired with another coder. Starting in 2023, we accept submissions. The gif above shows the original website, which I built in 2016. When you click, you'll find the my 2023 revamp of the website.

Web-based game, 3 min, 2022.

KLEPTOGARDEN documents an anonymous friend's practice of klepto-activism during a two-month period. During Covid lockdown, she began stealing from large companies known to have exploitative or politically violent practices (and to be benefitting from the current crisis). As a small white able-bodied upper-middle class cis woman, she is not identified as a threat in stores: she is particularly well-suited for this form of activism. Inspired by Moten/Harney and others, KLEPTOGARDEN promotes/normalizes stealing as a form of activism, while documenting my friend's own privilege and needs/wants. It is also, through the process of cropping and arranging these objects, an attempt to become more comfortable with AFK possessions, in general.

Web-based 3D VR experience, 8 min, 2021.

BEFORE THE BELLY is a Biblical speculative fiction. Swallowed by whales, we learn to communicate as they do: over long distances, but without being watched or manipulated by big tech. When we’re reborn from their mouths, we retain that ability via “bits” of their bellies we carry with us—umbilical tools. Armed with that new cyborgian strength but suffering from traumatic amnesia, we try to remember the apocalypse we inhabited before being swallowed.

BEFORE THE BELLY stokes the radical possibilities of the biblical story of Jonah, whose rebirth was genderless and posthuman (via the whale): here, unlike in the original story, we enact our own birth; retain connection with those who bore us; are born not of God’s henchmen, but of instructors; are not alone, but collective; and, most importantly, learn not obedience, but rebellion.

NOTE: The website, unfortunately, is currently broken. I hope to fix it soon, but may not!

Mass email, 4 min, 2020. Published with screen_.

For + COMPOSE ^ UNREAD, collaborators deleted/edited excerpts I’d chosen from Google’s Terms of Service and Google’s Privacy Policy. They then emailed me with the intervened texts spread across the subject line and the body. The final email installation (sent via screen_) shows excerpts from a video performance of myself “reading” the emails I received. + COMPOSE ^ UNREAD is a communal attempt to invade/expand/violate language that contains/manipulates/tricks. We throw the altered language back in the face of its creators by embedding it in Gmail’s own system (first my personal inbox, and then the inboxes of everyone on screen_’s mailing list). This is primarily an aesthetic destabilization/glitch of Google’s power structures, but it also performs real microaggression against Google by producing illegible data about myself and my friends.

Video, 7 min, 2020. Released with Hole Records.

OUT THE RED was made in collaboration with cellist Mabe Fratti and video artist Maddie Butler. Executed in peak pandemic lockdown, it attempts digital connection-cum-self-preservation. Our process was layered improvisation: we started with Mabe's recording of herself playing the cello; I listened to the track once, listened a second time while writing, then listened a third while singing what I'd written (and recording myself); Mabe added these two tracks together, and we each took multiple videos of ourselves responding physically to the track. Through several Zoom chats with Maddie, we brought all this content together into a video. This is a piece about intense longing for loved ones over distance: here, we attempt to coincide, and settle for digital layering, or existing in parallel.

Web-based VR, 2 min, 2020.

Built in a VR framework, my previous personal webpage asserted a right to illegibility: I did not want my accomplishments easily organized by chronology or type; a younger artist, I wanted privacy as I discovered where my voice should be. The site caricatures these desires by hiding links to my work inside "rocks," which users must go into head-on. Closer rocks contain works I was more eager for people to see; that was the only organization present, and users had no knowledge of it. The site also refused to describe the works it showed, insisting that users find meaning and form via exploration. I still feel close to this site, but my new site will be more generous.

Website, 7 min, 2019. Shown at the ELO Conference in Cork, Ireland.

BLISTER SKIN is a website comprising 11 web pages. Each page shows friends’ computer screens as they looked up their fears, and texts I wrote (that act as links); all items are draggable. The videos expose not only the makers' specific relationship to their fears, but also their digital tics.

Physically alone with our screens, we forget that our actions online are not private -- and often shield our screens from human eyes. But at the same time, we are scrutinized and manipulated by big tech. What’s more, those same companies make our online worlds more and more different from those of our peers, individualized and specialized into alienation. BLISTER SKIN is a hyper-local and hyper-ephemeral intervention in this hallucinatory hypocrisy.

Website, 8 min, 2019.

Each song of Inner Sides is made of one (extensively layered/edited) continuous recording of improvised music/language. The only materials are my voice and sounds so often experienced privately that I forget they do not come from myself. What sounds like a chorus (great old symbol of connectivity) is actually masturbatory, solipsistic. The songs reorder when the page is refreshed, and users are encouraged to play them simultaneously, enacting their own layering/conducting. Users are also encouraged to listen in a public space on headphones. When Inner Sides was first presented, participants entered through a plastic ring I fitted to them with the url on it. These were my first musical experiments, and are too obviously derivative of Anohni/CocoRosie.

Website, 5 min, 2018. Shown at Bandini Espacio Cultural in Mexico City, Mexico.

GURGLING BIRD YOU GO contains original language and numbers pulled from the time and the cursor position. Readers follow the direction “stay with me” by scrolling down with that text. They then follow the directions “hold on to me” and “don’t let me go” by trying to click and drag those texts. When they do so, they see that those texts quickly slip away from their cursors. Clicking on these elements also changes “stay with me” to “leave me,” and makes three longer texts appear further down on the page. GURGLING BIRD YOU GO is an experiment in merging sentimental language and instructional language, to make both tangible/real/strange again.

Website, 6 min, 2018. Shown at El Quinto Piso in Mexico City, Mexico.

MOON DRAWN was made in collaboration with cellist Mabe Fratti. When you enter the page, you hear one audio track. You also see one very large video with several smaller versions of the same video. When you click and hold the large video, it slowly becomes smaller to reveal another large video behind it. When you click on any of the smaller videos, which shrink upon hover, new audio tracks start, playing simultaneously with the original audio and/or each other. The result is a symphony that is different for every user. The site is also available in Spanish, with entirely different recordings.

Website installation, 6 min, 2017. Shown at Yeah Maybe gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For THE FRONT LOWER PART OF YOUR NECK, I mined language from medical websites and medical online forums — and then cut-and-pasted this language together into fictive prose pieces, editing aggressively (but only adding punctuation/articles/conjunctions). These texts appear in two parallel “windows.” In the installation, they were mapped onto literal windows, with dusty white plastic blinds drawn down. Up to three viewers were allowed into the room at a time, where they controlled the website from the corner via a computer on a pedestal. When readers hover over the texts, they can see where the words have been pasted together, and the words begin to increase in size/move. When readers click on either of the texts, a video appears; when they click on that video, another video appears; and so on, until they reach an ocean.