Huge
Animals,
Get Better
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.
Prestidig-
ital *67
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.)
Theo in
Bits Theo
Holds Taut
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 w 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.
ORAL.pub
Web-based magazine, 2017-20, 2023-present. Featured in Casa Equis, 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.
Babies,
Stud
Hypertext, 5 min, 2021-2. Shown with The Wrong Biennale.
BABIES, STUD is a experiment in cyborg divination: I collaborated with DALLE/GANs to create original images, and then
wrote narrative poems through those images. Here, the machine is a god (whose ways are unknown and miraculous, often
violent, full of meaning) and I am a messenger (willingly ignorant, fully faithful). I planned to make a series of similar pieces — techno-mystical
circulinear websites that housed narrative poems, illustrated with the images that birthed them — but social media became over-saturated with similar images, I got tired of them.
Before
the
Belly
Web-based VR, 7 min, 2021. Published in The New River journal in 2022.
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.
+Compose
^Unread
Out the
Red
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.
Previous
Personal
Website
Blister
Skin
Inner
Sides
Gurgling
Bird You
Go
Moon
Drawn
POND
The Front
Lower Part of
Your Neck
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.
Older
*** My Great-Aunt, directed by Frida Robles, 2018
*** Tribes of Eclipse, directed by Eli Mandel, 2018
*** Recklessly Heterosexual, directed by Lourdes Martinez,
2017
*** This Beautiful Street, 2015
*** Rot We Rot, 2015
*** Tongue Eats What Eats Tongue, with Shahrzad Changalvaee,
2013
Theo Ellin Ballew: Mobile Writing
Mass email, 4 min, 2020. Published with SCREEN_.
Web-based VR, 2 min, 2020. 
Website, 7 min, 2019. Shown at the ELO Conference in Cork, Ireland.
Website, 8 min, 2019.
Website, 5 min, 2018. Shown at Bandini Espacio Cultural in Mexico City, Mexico.
Website, 6 min, 2018. Shown at Quinto Piso in Mexico City, Mexico.
Binding format, 8 min, 2018. Published with Tagvverk.