The truth is, things break down. The human body breaks down, and our culture isn't willing to acknowledge that. We are blinded by the fear of our own vulnerability and a peculiarly insistent ethic — that the non-productive do not deserve our consideration. My project and my thesis are an attempt to assimilate the aftermath of caregiving. More narrowly, my project and thesis treat with a specific area of institutional elder care (meaning in the nursing home or skilled nursing facility), that is, with adults sufficiently disabled as to need incontinence care, colloquially known as diaper care, and those who labor to provide it. Consistently, the business of incontinence care for the elderly disabled at the management and policy levels shows a breathtaking failure of empathy, a gleaming and flawless inability of humans to relate the human needing care with their own humanity. I took my lessons from advertising and politics: nobody buys on the facts. Or on ethical standards. People need truths to be contextualized for them and that can’t be done without having those truths placed in the correct emotional territory; they need to be emotionally contextualized. My project, the 'beautiful song', is a solo choral work in five movements, 37 minutes of tender vocals and abrasive instrumentals contextualizing this not-to-be-spoken-of state of being. "A Beautiful Song About Incontinence Neglect" lays out an emotional territory for the apprehension of the truth that bodies break down, and honors that truth with love and sorrow. This thesis paper voices the project's underpinnings and muses on the act of writing 'about' a piece of writing read aloud as ‘speech’ and vocalized as song, processed through Plato’s Pharmacy. The processing is less as theory than as an instrument, improvised for playing riffs on a theme of motherness.

A collection of short essays, observations, and dérives. The piece negotiates the collage of research and experience that informs the creation of a long-form project, in this case the execution of an animated film. Reflective of this, the writing jumps from topic to topic, following the scent of meaning in an art practice. A walk through Los Angeles abuts the screen memory of 20th century animation, leading to a metaphysical discussion of time. The piece muses on the ethics of representation in pornography, while exploring the effects of severe depression on a maker. As with the animated film, Smoke’s Last Thought, the scope of an individual widens over the span of the writing.

During the making of the sculptures for this exhibition, I held in my mind what I identified as the poetic epochs of water: circulation, contamination, filtration, elimination, and renewal. These poetic epochs are imagined. They dance around and between the stages identified as the water cycle, or hydrologic cycle: collection, evaporation, condensation, and precipitation. These poetic epochs relate water with psychological cycles of processing emotions and experience. A cyclical nature is something that both humans and water share. Water, in its many forms, and as a living society of forms, offers us opportunities for transformation. We can become something else in our relationship to water. Sometimes our cycles can be vicious, but the momentum of the cycle is what makes us all creatures in and of motion, and in motion there is opportunity for change. Feeling into hydrosystemic entanglements for an expression of extensive connectedness, I’ve been re-evaluating ecological values, with cosmological aspirations. I am now convinced all the world is a fountain and people merely transports for water.

On the surface, the visual and textual languages of The Keeling (2021) and this encyclopedia are disparately related, but they influence each other synergistically. The visual language of the exhibition is a speculative space suspended between an art gallery and a futuristic natural history museum. Varying levels of scale, abrasivity, hostility, and gentility frame the visual language in The Keeling (2021), and gallery visitors must determine for themselves how they fall along or outside those spectrums of physical and visual perception. Although this text is highly personal, conversational, and anecdotal, it is the accumulation of those thoughts and experiences that informed each work in the exhibition. An encyclopedia of a sublimated version of myself and my art practice to offer a guidebook into the spaces, both tangible and intangible, that I inhabit, have evolved from, and aim to grow into. When each of the ideas behind the works in The Keeling (2021) are sublimated, you receive each of the rambling thoughts in this written thesis. This is all a very long way of explaining that you can’t have me without the work and you can’t have the work without me, but I also don’t really want you to have them together. Therefore, I give you The Encyclopedia of Sublimation (2021) composed alongside and inside The Keeling (2021).

This paper proposes information technology (IT) infrastructure is formulating a universal language. It dips into historic efforts to create a universal language via avant garde filmmaking and Gottfried Leibniz’s characteristica universalis. It then explains how international standardization organizations are developing the globally unified infrastructural language through their regulations. The paper weighs the benefits and consequences of a universal language by looking into who IT infrastructure serves and who is excluded. Finally, it explains the curatorial process and implementations of the exhibition Spectacular Grammar: Infrastructure as a Universal Language, a program featuring five artists, designers, and activists envisioning a world where everyone speaks internet.

Part one begins with how information technology has become the primary mediator for communication, and how that influences the way people express themselves. As Marshall McLuhan inferred in his 1964 essay, “The Medium is the Message,” technology becomes inseparable from the messages it transmits, adding another layer of meaning to what is communicated; language, in turn, starts to be shaped around the tools that facilitate it. Thus, IT infrastructure is not just a tool to communicate, but is part of language itself.

Part two covers the curatorial process for Spectacular Grammar, a program that featured Mindy Seu, paige watkins, Feminist.AI, and Color Coded. Using different research methods, including a retreat, a series of workshops, a publication with commissioned essays, a gallery exhibition, and a public lecture, Spectacular Grammar helped explain the concepts of IT infrastructure’s role in formulating universal language to the general public.

An essay describing the realization of the thesis exhibition Afterlight. The writing describes two artworks included in the exhibition; Respiring Lawn, and Afterlight, as well as a collection of earlier works which informed the creation of the project. The piece explores topics related to the artworks such as historic lighthouse lens technology, contemporary lawncare technologies, beekeeping, Colony Collapse Disorder, invasive plant species, and the detrimental effects of pesticide use on the environment. The writing also dabbles in the spiritual connection to plants, bees, and technology; and investigates the contemporary influences of Dark Ecology upon ecologically-minded artmaking practices. The essay concludes by positing a theory on how artworks will exist and be utilized in the aftermath of the Sixth Extinction.

Transfer & ReAssembled describes the collective work of a group of artists, Andrea Hidalgo, Natalie Delgadillo, Rachel Finkelstein, Jules Marasa, James Basilio, Eylese Davis, Miranda Maynard, Eugenia Barbuc and Josh Burwell, interested in exploring collectivity and haptic exchanges in virtual space. Barbuc presents transcripts from zoom meetings, describes the work alongside queer theory of coalition and utopia and situates the collaborative project alongside Fred Moten’s essay Collective Head. Thinking with Moten’s description of the commune as ephemeral, this thesis attempts to embody the affective exchanges between group members, art objects and sibling relationships that inspire ways of assembling to create collective bodies with which to share resources, thoughts and work.