Color code performance series

 

We now live in an age when, as the story goes, the image offers up less a display for the human eye than a data set, latent yet generative, that functions within operational systems. In short, the dominant status of the image has shifted from an optical configuration to a computational one. Within the techno-political context, questions abound regarding this status of the image as well as its relation to the classificatory and descriptive powers of semantic text.

My current series is a further manifestation of the project titled «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist» (2018-Present). The ongoing «Lost Grids» began with the provocative coupling of images and texts cited from the cultural archive. These couplings were organized into relatively small, thematically associative networks that as an ensemble embody a kind of «vernacular archive» of their own. For each of these small networks of image-text pairings, one coupling was selected for a calculated misuse of digital code: The semantic text was entered directly into the underlying digital code-bed of its corresponding visual image. Rather than pursuing the visible and legible strategy of culture jamming (détournement), this collision of incompatible «languages» resulted in a specific visual glitch in the optical image, which was then magnified and adapted, in the specificity of its failed state, for a particular artistic expression: prints, artist books, and so forth.

I have begun a new contribution to this ongoing work: a series of video installations that maintain but invert this relationship between data and semantic display. The video installations integrate extended recitations of the underlying hexadecimal code for the soundtrack of the visual projection of the magnified glitch’s color palette. The recitation manifests as both vocal presentation (reading aloud) and as subtitle. This doubling reveals a sometimes surprising performative interpretation brought to bear in reciting the hexadecimal code. The divergence between visual subtitle of code and the unexpected elements of its recitation opens up a question of «reading» in a broad sense.

Each of these installations will be available in multiple durations, from 2.5 minutes to 5 minutes to one hour, all designed for different presentational contexts. Here you will find a 2.5 minute version of the recitational color/code installation for the first grid titled «Marx‘s Beard»: Color-Code: Marx’s Beard [click HD].

 

Conference on art + psychoanalysis: Faculty of Philosophy, Complutense University Madrid

I attended and gave a talk at the Al Encuentro de lo Real (Toward an Encounter with the Real) conference, organized by the Lacanian group (Seminario Lacan Complutense) of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid. Overall, the four-day conference offered a terrific series of presentations on wide ranging topics to forge relations between art and psychoanalysis (with special emphasis on the Lacanian Real), including panels, performances, debates, and informal exchanges….

…Positioned in the conference thread on artistic practice and resistance against the neoliberal commandment to enjoy, my talk «Towards a non-orientable methodology for art practice» proposed a quasi-model for developing individual and collaborative art projects, ultimately linking the Lacanian conception of impossibility and the urgent topic of collectivity.

Poetry Slam

A nice diversion from preparations for a Madrid conference and next phase of a curatorial project. First time to participate in an actual poetry slam. The hosting team, Makis and Yzaura, were generous, and I enjoyed talking to folks after the event.

Reprise exhibition: Iran|Usa with artist talk

A transcript of the artist talk and dialogue: Iran|Usa artist talk 2026.

The first of the past weekend’s Middle East attacks on Saturday (28 Feb 2026) came the day of the reprise exhibition of my Iran|Usa show (staged in Tehran in 2015 and remounted in an expanded solo museum exhibit in 2017). This year New York’s Hudson Milliner Art Salon had already been showcasing one of the video installations from the Iran|Usa trilogy in their current group show (Jan-March 2026) when they arranged a special evening event to screen the full trilogy followed by an artist talk and discussion (via Zoom) that evening. I had been looking forward to showing the three pieces together in the U.S. again, after having presented individual pieces in various international gallery and festival settings in the intervening years. The coincidence of the attacks on the day of the exhibit resonated through the event that endeavored to navigate the relations and distinctions between art and politics.

 
 
 
 

The End of an Error 01 (video triptych): more information.

Acorus Calamus: more information.

Erased Mossadegh: more information.

Group exhibition: Reimagining Americana (Jan-March 2026)

My video installation, «The End of an Error», is screening in the Nation Faces: Reimagining Americana at the Hudson Milliner Art Salon, Jan 17-March 17, 2026. The venue is just up the Hudson in Hudson, New York.

An expanded screening of my Iran|Usa installation trilogy is slated for the night of Saturday, 28 February 2026, followed by Q&A and discussion with the Salon audience. (For more information and transcript, see March 1, 2026 blog entry.)

 

Conference: Time, Art & Contemporary Subjectivity (11-12 December 2025)

 
 

Last week I attended and did a talk+screening in the two-day conference, «Time, Art & Contemporary Subjectivity», at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The program line-up:

DAY 1

Peter Osborne (Kingston University London). The I and the We (the You, the It, and the They): Subjectivity, Personhood and Thingness in Hegel, Benveniste, Freud and Marx

Anaïs Nony (Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study). Beyond preemptive time, towards a political ecology of minds in the age of AI

Peter Freund (Saint Mary’s College of California). The Productive Impasse of Synchronization

Pol Capdevila (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Who’s that? Exploring Subjectivity in Moving Portraiture

Gregorio Tenti (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Painting Deep Time. Art and Incommensurable Temporalities

Marta Echaves (Independent). K-Time

Maria Pinell Plana (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). Together in rhythm. Experimental cinema and collectivity through Artistic Research


DAY 2

Mauro Carbone (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3). Subjectivation: individual, dividual, condividual

Alice Iacobone (University of St. Gallen). Minor Subjectivities, Nonlinear Temporalities. Aesthetics, Poetics and Politics in the Curatorial and Theoretical Work of Georges Didi-Huberman

Víctor Ramírez Tur (Universitat de Barcelona). What Does the Time of the Dead Awaken in Me? Mourning Intersubjectivities in Artistic Practice – Canceled

Sabel Gavaldon (MACBA). Surviving Liveness: Archives of Gesture and the Voguing Body

Marta Nijhuis (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3). Wasting Time, Making Time: Artistic Practice in the Age of Real-Time

Aimar Pérez Galí (Institut del Teatre de Barcelona). Anacronismos somáticos

DU-DA (Independent). Lenta estrella fugaz

 

Poetry Open Mic 2

Gypsy Lounge Barcelona open mic, this past Saturday night, presenting a vignette from the novel in progress. Reading aloud can be like pulling a painting off the easel and holding it to a mirror. You see more in reverse. As for the program, there was a lot of variety (a mix of poetry, prose, pantomime, song) and a nice turnout. And it seems, always newcomers and regulars.

 
 

Mudas Museum Exhibit De-installation

Our (May-October 2025) exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art closed today. (For more information and photos, see June 1, 2025 blog post.) Packing boxes are out, lights off for projections (back half of main room pictured below). What a process leading up to this show. Nearly four years since the initial proposal. Along the way, many many obstacles – some absurdities – we turned to benefits. Truly «retractive», in my vocabulary. Vitor did a Portuguese TV interview on the exhibit and will be publishing an article in a very good magazine. Next up: prepare the exhibit catalogue/book.

 
 
 
 

MACBA Museum acquires «Lost Grids»

Two years after the fact, this morning I happily discovered my project listed in the catalogue of the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) as purchased for their Archive: «Lost Grids: or How to Explain Digital Media to a Dead Socialist» (see the catalogue description above). The artist book comprises a clothbound hardcover enclosure containing prints and pamphlets with image-text materials and poetic reflections for each of the five sections or «chapters»: Marx’s Beard, Arrival of the Train, Novella del Grasso, The House Is Black, and Portolan Orifice. I developed the ideas for this artist book portion of the project as the focus of my 2018-19 sabbatical residency with the MACBA Centre for Research and Documentation. A few years later, the book was completed and, in addition, other manifestations (video installations, prints, five loose-leaf books of 500+ pages each of hexadecimal code, etc). Some of these other manifestations form a key part of a current exhibition at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal: «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue». The exhibition runs May through October 2025.

MACBA ARCHIVE Listing

 

«The wager of the algorithm» just published in ARTEACTA journal, issue 13.

 
 

Driven by a twist of humor, a political annoyance, and a flight of fancy, I present this hybrid essay and artwork. Two ideas of artificial intelligence prevail today: one utopian, the other paranoid. My exposition endeavors to find a third path (artistic+political) beyond these two views by tampering with internal structural contradictions in the very logic of artificial intelligence itself.

My calculated misstep of academic prose «The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture» was just published in the SAR performance studies journal ARTEACTA (Czech Republic), this issue #13 on AI (and) Art: The Poetics of Prompting. Allusions to computation theory, art history, philosophy, and work I’ve done with AI and code give context for the central argument. Some experimentation with the conventions and limits of academic prose should be expected.

[View URL on computer only for proper formatting. Click link here:
The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture.]


ABSTRACT:
The fantasy of the algorithm and, by extension, artificial intelligence imagines that each performs by executing an operational task. Yet, based on its inherent computational structure, the digital performance fails to live up to its instrumental promise. This failure foregrounds an occasion for artistic intervention. “The Wager of the Algorithm: Towards a Performatic Gesture” presents a theoretical statement (illustrated via artwork by the author) in which the overall exposition underscores a dialectic within instrumental reason itself. The “prompt” names a shorthand for the fulcrum of this problematic.

 

New Exhibition at Mudas Contemporary Art Museum (Portugal)

After four years of developments and preparations, our exhibition «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue» opened the evening of May 30 at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art in Madeira, Portugal. The show, a collaboration between the Barcelona-based art collective Adversorecto (Peter Freund and Werner Thöni) and Portuguese artist and professor Vítor Magalhães, runs May 30 - Oct 25, 2025. The opening intervention, «The Right Hand Doesn’t Know What the Left Hand Is Doing», a live performance art presentation featuring the trio, was launched during the May 30 opening.

 
 
 

WALL TEXT:
The Question of the Curator, or Three Torsions of Retraction 

Prohibition. It will have come down to an absence. The classical exhibition of visual art begins and ends with a prohibition: Do not touch. Touch, of course, between the work on display and the observer whose reflections will have been sparked by this withdrawal from physical and intellectual possession. The same prohibition will have applied, like the flip side of a coin, to the requisite space individuating the works themselves.

Inhibition. This pervasive inhibition will have created openings and formed a placeholder for the missing element that makes possible the artistic presentation: the organizing concept, the combinatorial of objects, the pouring rain outside, the shrinking gallery space, the delay of the lost spectator, the guard's outgrown shoe, the empty elevator, the intermittent flashing of the exit sign, the janitor's bucket behind the closing of the closet door, the death of the old mason…. In the end, as in the beginning, the placeholder will have signaled the undefined prime mover: the absent curator. And yet this absence remains, at bottom, a lacuna.

Exhibition. It will have been no accident that the three words – prohibition, inhibition, and exhibition – have related histories. The invited curator ex post facto will have lofted the unexpected concept of the decalogue over a previously proposed exhibit of ten pieces like a nautical fishing net. The curator's surprise net will have in turn made prohibition into the inspiration for merging the individuated pieces into new works. The original exhibit proposal presented a «bout» between Karl and Ady: Marx and his furry companion. A beard and a dog. A forest paradise. A fashion show. A twitching neck and shoulders below an unseen beard. In the curatorial net, the dog will have turned herself inside out in order to reappear as a beard made of billiard sticks. The gallery rooms become a pool table for a match at the precise moment of initial contact. Crackk!


Quick tour of «Round 1.1: A Hairy Decalogue», an Adversorecto + Magalhães exhibition 2025 (Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art, Madeira, Portugal).

Poetry Reading

I participated in a reading at a local English bookshop for a writing competition. The true triumph: first time walking down stairs into a cultural venue since the busted leg and surgeries during the three months prior. The nice surprise in the end: winning the poetry competition.

Family collecting me after the reading.

What do you mean by what I say? :: encontro em torno do livro «M [objecto]» ::

As the opening of our exhibit at the Mudas Museum of Contemporary Art (Madeira, Portugal) approaches, a publication from my collaboration last year with artist and professor Vitor Magalhães recently came out. The publication creatively documents an intervention that was presented at the University of Madeira in conjunction with Vitor’s Mudas 2023-24 exhibition, to which I’d contributed a fictional text for an artist book and an audio installation. For the intervention, I made a video installation. A few sample pages from the publication are below.

« ZERO (0): A LOVE STORY » : WORK IN PROGRESS


Zero (0): A Love Story is a novella written entirely with numbers. The more than 200-page hand-stenciled book recounts a tale of two characters and the serial rendezvous of their enumerative affair. 

The first character embodies a succession of numbers belonging to the phi (aka Fibonacci) sequence, the traditional gold standard of aesthetic proportion. Over the course of the tale, the ordinal trajectory of this figure’s fall in love starts from a 21-digit number and proceeds in reverse, moving progressively backwards across 100 integers until eventually arriving at and continuing to descend beyond zero (0). 

The second character takes the form of corrected errors appearing in the positive expression of the first character’s integers. These visible erasures and amendments move forward in the opposite direction within the phi sequence. The book thereby begins with zero errors, then moves to one error, then one again, then two errors, then three, then five, then eight and so forth until the redressed mistakes reach the limit of digits in the numbers the first character happens to express at a given instant in the series. At this threshold, the second character reverses its restorative course back toward zero and then from zero proceeds again upward through the Fibonacci sequence. The second figure repeats this to-and-fro pattern oscillating like a breath or tide that continuously permeates the ongoing retrocession of the first figure. 

The narrative arc provides on each page a singular encounter between the two characters who advance hand in hand as if ships at every moment inseparably passing in the night. 

Zero (0): A Love Story will take the form of a physical book as well as a series of projected still images.


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