CREAK
Installation / Performance with Joanne Brigham
Art Crawl: Houston, TX 2000-01
CREAK, a site-specific temporary installation, was exhibited at the Preston Workshop for Houston's annual Art Crawl 2000. Suspended from exisitng mechanical equipment and an overhead trolley that ran the length of a 16 feet wideby 60 feet long space with a 20 feet high ceiling, the installation was an assemblage composed of previously exhibited works exploring interactive forms caught between the biological and the technological.
The term 'creak', borrowed from Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, describes a "jerky relation between the parts..." and represents an explicit notion of the instability of contemporary cities and urban conditions. The spatial quality of such an architecture tends to negate traditional ways of distinguishing interior from exterior and encourages tension as a state inbetween.
The uneasy tension between the pieces and their simultaneity of being both objects and inside-out spaces traces the evolution of the ongoing process-intensive investigations of +parasite. Hung in suspended states of (in)animation, the biomorphic fiberglass and diode embedded recycled brass screen skin strectches over a bamboo and metal reinforcing bar armature. The work reacts to changes in the environment with its own internal movement, sound, and light. The total effect presents a vision of technological skin, skelatal structure, neural networks and organs developing an identity in an increasingly prosthetic world.