Greg's Artist Statement

Computational logic fascinates me. When you use a computer, you enter another world governed by its own set of rules, laws, and expressions. Nothing is truly random or happenstance, whether it be a browser loading a website, or a text editor crashing. Everything that occurs inside the world of a computer can be broken down to logical expressions that we as humans determined.

Like most of us , I frequent this computer world daily. I enter it to work. I enter it to relax. I enter it to learn. On the surface, it’s like magic. But if you start to understand the laws of this world, you’ll soon realize that you can do more than experience what it has to offer – you can create those experiences. In this computer world that humans designed, you can become a magician.

And so I find myself creating illusions – cobbling together digital tech and logic in order to put on a show for visitors to this computer world. Curlew is built as a website that, through various applications, speaks with a Kinect in order to blend the experience of kinetic immersion and poetic expression. It uses several JavaScript libraries to control and manipulate its media through a series of conditional statements and functions. But that isn’t what the audience will see. The audience will see harpies, water, and a man’s desperate struggle to preserve his way of life. They will see the illusion that we have built through the computational laws of this other world.

Because, at the end of the day, that’s what the audience wants to see – the illusion. And that’s why you’ll find me behind the stage and screen, hiding wires and writing code to preserve the magic that we all so desire.