My Water Works project recently got coverage in BOOM: A Journal of California and I couldn’t be more pleased. A few months ago, I was contacted by the editorial staff to write about the 3D printed maps and data-visualization for Water Works. What most impressed me is the context for this publication, which is a conversation about California, in their […]
Just after the Dow Jones dropped 1000 points on Aug 24th (yesterday), I checked out how EquityBot was doing. Annual rate of return of > -50% Crazy! Of course, this is like taking the tangent of any curve and making a projection. A day later, EquityBot is at -32%. Still not good, but if if you were to invest […]
EquityBot will be presented at this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art at Vancouver. The theme is Disruption. You can always follow EquityBot here: @equitybot. EquityBot is an automated stock-trading algorithm that uses emotions on Twitter as the basis for investments in a simulated bank account. This art project poses the question: can an artist create a stock-trading […]
One of the cameras they have here at the Signal Culture Residency is the Barbie Video Girl cam. This was a camera embedded inside a Barbie doll, produced in 2010. The device was discontinued most notably after the FBI accidentally leaked a warning about possible predatory misuses of the camera, is patently ridiculous. The interface is awkward. The […]
Not to be confused with Deleuze and Guattari, this is a company that makes various hardware music synths. For my new project, Machine Data Dreams, I’m looking at how machines might “think”, starting with the amazing analog video machines at Signal Culture. This morning, I successfully stabilized my Arduino data logger. This captures the raw video […]
Hands down my favorite Atari game when I was a kid was Adventure (2). The dragons looked like giant ducks. Your avatar was just a square and a bat wreaks chaos by stealing your objects. In the ongoing research for my new Machine Data Dreams project, beginning here at Signal Culture, I’ve been playing with the analog video […]
In the first full day of the residency at Signal Culture, I played around with the video and audio synthesizers. It’s a new world for me. While my focus is on the Machine Data Dreams project, I also want to play with what they have and get familiar with the amazing analog equipment. I started with this […]
Earlier this year, I received an Individual Artist Commission grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission for a new project called Machine Data Dreams. I was notified months ago, but the project was on the back-burner until now — where I’m beginning some initial research and experiments at a residency called Signal Culture. I expect full immersion in the fall. […]
“People I Want to Punch in the Face” is a book sold at the Whitney (and apparently on Etsy as well) with blank pages. In one of them, unbeknownst to the bookstore staff, assorted visitors filled in their choices.
The inevitable conversation about evictions at San Francisco every party…art organizations closing, friends getting evicted…the city is changing. It has become a boring topic, yet it is absolutely, completely 100% real. For the Bad Data series — 12 data-visualizations depicting socially-polarized, scientifically dubious and morally ambiguous dataset, each etched onto an aluminum honeycomb panel — I am featuring two works: 18 Years of Evictions in […]
The reception for my solo show “Bad Data”, featuring the Bad Data series is this Friday (July 24, 2015) at A Simple Collective. Date: July 24th, 2015 Time: 7-9pm Where: ASC Projects, 2830 20th Street (btw Bryant and York), Suite 105, San Francisco The question I had, when pricing these works was how do you sell Bad Data? The material costs […]
In 1989, I read Neuromancer for the first time. The thing that fascinated me the most was not the concept of “cyberspace” that Gibson introduced. Rather it was the physical description of virtual data. The oft-quoted line is: “The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games. … Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, […]
I recently finished a new artwork — called Genetic Portraits — which is a series of microscope photographs of laser-etched glass that data-visualize a person’s genetic traits. I specifically developed this work as an experimental piece, for the Bearing Witness: Surveillance in the Drone Age show. I wanted to look at an extreme example of how we […]
The first day after arriving in Paris, we embarked on a dérive — the French word for a “drift” — an unplanned journey (usually) through an urban space. The idea is to immerse yourself in the moment, the now of a city. No maps, no mobile phones, no direction, just walk and make choices on where […]
This Thursday (June 8, 2015), will be the opening of Make Art, Not Landfill, which is the 25th Anniversary of the Recology Artists in Residence program. If you are in San Francisco, you should go to the show. I first heard about the program in the late 1990s. In 2010, I saw the 20th Anniversary […]
I recently achieved one of my life goals. I was on NPR! The article, “Artists In Residence Give High-Tech Projects A Human Touch” discusses my Water Works* project as well as artwork by Laura Devendorf, and more generally, the artist-in-residence program at Autodesk. “Water Works” 3D-printed Sewer Map in 3D printer at Autodesk The production quality and caliber of the […]
I’m experimenting with a new model for sustainable art practice: leveraging the intellectual property from my technology-infused artworks into lucrative contracts. And why not? Artists are creative engines and deserve to be compensated. Teaching is how many of my ilk get their income and every professor I’ve talked to about the university-academia track constantly moans about the silo-like environment, the petty politics, the drudgery […]
“a massive orgy of sugar cubes”…When my artwork gets denigrated like this, I almost always laugh. My skin isn’t extra-thick, but after the Wikipedia Art project, where I got called a “troll” by Jimmy Wales (in the days before ‘trolling’ was common parlance), I always find humor in the insult. In this case it, is […]
Let’s not get too excited until the reviews come out, but it’s always nice to receive some advance press coverage. For this upcoming show, which is at the Peninsula Art Museum in Burlingame, I will be presenting my Data Crystals artwork. These have been written about extensively in the press, but not yet shown in an exhibition. […]
Tonight, Victoria Scott and I gave a solid talk at Plug-In Gallery in Winnipeg, with support from Erika Lincoln and the Winnipeg Arts Council. Here, I am with an old friend, Ken Gregory, artist, hardware hacker and kinetic sculpture of many decades. It was great to see him again after nearly 5 years. I co-presented with Victoria, who […]
Here’s my dirty secret. If you pay me a small stipend, I will come to your class and talk about my artwork. It’s one of my favorite things to do. Last week, it was Jenny Odell’s class at the San Francisco Art Institute: Probing Social Networks. Her work is smart and I’ve been a fan, […]
My Water Works data-visualization was just featured in MetaTrend Journal (“Big Datification”, Volume 63, March 2015). It’s a subscription model, so you can’t read the article, plus it’s in Korean, which means I definitely can’t read it. I did get some partial text emailed to me from the organization and run it through Google translate, which gave me […]
On March 27th & 28th (2015), Victoria Scott and I will be conducting a workshop in Winnipeg around the “libricide” in Canada’s DFO libraries. The full article on their closures is here. Here’s the description On March 27th & 28th, 2015, San Francisco-based artists Victoria Scott and Scott Kildall will be leading 2-day, hands-on workshop […]
This Thursday at 6pm at Root Division, I will be part of evening of conversation and performance. The short talk I’ll be giving will be called Death and Language. In 1972, my father, Gary Kildall, wrote the first high-level computer language for Intel’s microprocessors. This language, called PL/M was instrumental in the development of the personal computer […]
The good folks at Pier 9, Autodesk just released this video-profile of me and my Water Works project. I’m especially happy with Charlie Nordstrom’s excellent videography work and even got the chance help with the editing of the video itself. Yes, in a previous life I used to do editing for video documentaries with now defunct, […]
I first met Nathaniel Tkacz, in India and then later in Amsterdam for a series of the Wikipedia CPOV (Critical Point of View) conferences. At these two events, my colleague, Nathaniel Stern and I were presenting a talk, which later became a paper on our Wikipedia Art project. Congratulations to Nathaniel Tkacz. He has just released his […]
Yesterday, I gave a brief artist talk at David Baker Architects, which is a local San Francisco architecture firm with numerous sustainability and innovation design awards. Here I am with David Baker, himself, who is sporting a stylish scarf. I want. It was a casual lunchtime talk with about 15 or 20 people in attendance. […]
I spent my time at the five-day long Impakt Festival watching screenings, listening to talks, interacting with artworks and making plenty of connections with both new and old friends. I’m still digesting the deluge of aesthetic approaches, subjective responses and formal interpretations of the theme of the festival, “Soft Machines: Where the Optimized Human Meets […]
The Impakt Festival officially kicked off this Wednesday evening, and the first event was the exhibition opening at Foto Dok, curated by Alexander Benenson. The works in the show circled around the theme of Soft Machines, which Impakt describes as “Where the Optimized Human Meets Artificial Empathy”. Of the many powerful works in the show, […]
During my time at Impakt as an artist-in-residence, I have been working on a new project called EquityBot, which is an online commission from Impakt. It fits well into the Soft Machines theme of the festival: where machines integrate with the soft, emotional world. EquityBot exists entirely as a networked art or “net art” project, […]