Reverse Tar Pit - Gallery 2

I apologize for crash landing my desktop. No matter how many times I Select All, Move to Trash, or hit the Arrow Keys, my porn and love letters escape me. “Sorry” is a story that I offer up to you: characters once loved, now staged as daddies and bears, cigars and cocks that travel through networked relations to settle, sink, and rise again from the tar — always facing you but forever out of reach, a reverse panopticon. The zip is a marriage of two archives that were both amassed over 15 years at the beginning of the web: pornographic jpegs downloaded from social/sexual sites and emails/text messages sent to/from men that I was dating and fucking. Both collections were sorted chronologically and the 1st jpeg was renamed with the 1st sentence, the 2nd jpeg was renamed with the 2nd sentence, and so on. When a person's name was mentioned, I replaced it with the original file name such as “do you, in your heart, your soul, your head, truly love BEAR0033.jpg”. Click on the link to download the zip that was originally commissioned by Rhizome.

Neon signs made for a speculative post-colonial cyberpunk Manila.  The imagery and visual style are directly taken from internet ads that target potential employees in post-colonial places for service industry labor in networked economies physically located elsewhere.

Concrete, spandex, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, motor, custom circuit board, led lights, electrical pipes and Laura Forlano's insulin pump alert data, 60 x 130 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 51 1/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Original Sound by Seth Cluett

A series of robotic sculptures made with data from Barrio’s collaborator Dr. Laura Forlano, a social scientist and design researcher. Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her “smart” insulin pump and then annotated with field notes. Composed of the artist’s disused spandex pants and concrete molded from packaging of products that she has consumed, the sculptures invoke desire and an uncanny sense of bodily intimacy through their subtle mimicry of human forms and movements. The series further divulges the exhaustive toll of capitalist labor systems on the body by machines that are increasingly essential for human survival. Following a blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, mechanistic behaviors are internalized into bodily functions as we continuously adapt to technological upgrades. These robotic sculptures poignantly elucidate humanity’s current relationship to technology, which continues to rely on human labor. They were first shown at Itziar Barrio’s solo show at Smack Mellon in NYC, 2023.

Concrete, spandex, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, pumps, tubes and custom circuit board. Variable dimensions

Original Sound by Seth Cluett

A series of robotic sculptures made with data from Barrio’s collaborator Dr. Laura Forlano, a social scientist and design researcher. Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her “smart” insulin pump and then annotated with field notes. Composed of the artist’s disused spandex pants and concrete molded from packaging of products that she has consumed, the sculptures invoke desire and an uncanny sense of bodily intimacy through their subtle mimicry of human forms and movements. The series further divulges the exhaustive toll of capitalist labor systems on the body by machines that are increasingly essential for human survival. Following a blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, mechanistic behaviors are internalized into bodily functions as we continuously adapt to technological upgrades. These robotic sculptures poignantly elucidate humanity’s current relationship to technology, which continues to rely on human labor. They were first shown at Itziar Barrio’s solo show at Smack Mellon in NYC, 2023.

Concrete, spandex, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, motor,custom circuit board, led lights, electrical pipes and Laura Forlano’s insulin pump alert data. Variable dimensions

Original Sound by Seth Cluett

A series of robotic sculptures made with data from Barrio’s collaborator Dr. Laura Forlano, a social scientist and design researcher. Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her “smart” insulin pump and then annotated with field notes. Composed of the artist’s disused spandex pants and concrete molded from packaging of products that she has consumed, the sculptures invoke desire and an uncanny sense of bodily intimacy through their subtle mimicry of human forms and movements. The series further divulges the exhaustive toll of capitalist labor systems on the body by machines that are increasingly essential for human survival. Following a blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, mechanistic behaviors are internalized into bodily functions as we continuously adapt to technological upgrades. These robotic sculptures poignantly elucidate humanity’s current relationship to technology, which continues to rely on human labor. They were first shown at Itziar Barrio’s solo show at Smack Mellon in NYC, 2023.

Concrete, spandex, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, motor,custom circuit board, led lights, electrical pipes and Laura Forlano’s insulin pump alert data. Variable dimensions

Original Sound by Seth Cluett

A series of robotic sculptures made with data from Barrio’s collaborator Dr. Laura Forlano, a social scientist and design researcher. Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her “smart” insulin pump and then annotated with field notes. Composed of the artist’s disused spandex pants and concrete molded from packaging of products that she has consumed, the sculptures invoke desire and an uncanny sense of bodily intimacy through their subtle mimicry of human forms and movements. The series further divulges the exhaustive toll of capitalist labor systems on the body by machines that are increasingly essential for human survival. Following a blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, mechanistic behaviors are internalized into bodily functions as we continuously adapt to technological upgrades. These robotic sculptures poignantly elucidate humanity’s current relationship to technology, which continues to rely on human labor. They were first shown at Itziar Barrio’s solo show at Smack Mellon in NYC, 2023.

Concrete, spandex, lighting filters, hardware, epoxy resin, Arduino, motor, custom circuit board, led lights, electrical pipes and Laura Forlano's insulin pump alert data, 125 x 60 x 63 cm (49 1/4 x 23 5/8 x 24 3/4 in)

Original Sound by Seth Cluett

A series of robotic sculptures made with data from Barrio’s collaborator Dr. Laura Forlano, a social scientist and design researcher. Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her “smart” insulin pump and then annotated with field notes. Composed of the artist’s disused spandex pants and concrete molded from packaging of products that she has consumed, the sculptures invoke desire and an uncanny sense of bodily intimacy through their subtle mimicry of human forms and movements. The series further divulges the exhaustive toll of capitalist labor systems on the body by machines that are increasingly essential for human survival. Following a blurring of boundaries between humans and machines, mechanistic behaviors are internalized into bodily functions as we continuously adapt to technological upgrades. These robotic sculptures poignantly elucidate humanity’s current relationship to technology, which continues to rely on human labor. They were first shown at Itziar Barrio’s solo show at Smack Mellon in NYC, 2023.

"Searching for Null" plunges into the enigma of Ethereum's 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 address, a digital void that harbors 'burned' funds, where transfers are sent to throw away a key. This address, often metaphorically likened to a black hole, receives assets when owners opt to discard their access keys, effectively sending value into a state of absence.

While brute forcing secret keys remains a double-edged sword—redeeming lost assets on one side and facilitating covert heists on the other—this project channels that intense computation to challenge a crypto myth. Could the so-called 'burned' assets ever be reclaimed? And if unearthed, where would they be best sent?

As the program relentlessly generates wallets and secret keys, striving for that elusive alignment with address(0), its journey is visualized through a maze's ever-evolving pathways, with shifting hues capturing its futile computational ebbs and flows. By juxtaposing the energy poured into the crypto architecture against that used for piracy, "Searching for Null" offers a contemplation into a burgeoning synthetic financial folklore.