Before it was taken as the name of this site, Embedded Script was the title of my graduate thesis exhibition, installed in one of the graduate galleries at OCAD University in Toronto, in early 2016. My work at the time was just starting to delve into Neoliberal Capitalism, and was mostly investigating the ways that Globalization has changed relationships to time, place and technology. While I have since developed a much stronger and more consistent understanding and ideology concerning Neoliberalism and Global Capitalism, as well as more developed technical skills, many of these pieces have served as sketches or launching points for further works. Most notably this includes Holding Pattern, which I recently completed a second iteration of.
Below is a description of each work, with excerpts from the original contextualizing material. Roughly half of them are now either missing physical components, or have become incompatible with contemporary computers / web browsers, and are thus referred to here in the past tense. Only two of the works, Flatland and Perfect Calm, has surviving video documentation, which is linked to in their descriptions.
You can also click here to return to Embeddedscript.net
Networked Space is a multi-room New Media installation work which explores the largely unseen network of global shipping routes. Shipping containers are used to migrate goods from one side of the world to the other at an unprecedented scale; a process which effectively erases the space between source and destination, upholding Neoliberal structures such as the global class divide. Networked Space inverts this relationship, giving the Viewer access only to a perpetual and indeterminable middle.
Earthlab was a collection of custom / hacked Google maps, each of which explored or questioned in some way the nature of contemporary mapping in both physical and digital spaces. Changes to Google Maps over time have rendered its original pieces unusable.
Land and Sea was a New Media sculpture piece which highlighted the divide, both physical and conceptual, between the Earth’s oceans and landmasses. The ocean forms an essential component of Neoliberal Capital’s global infrastructure, in the form of both shipping routes and undersea communication cables, and in spite / because of this it remains largely unseen and unaccounted for. The original sculpture was dismantled at the end of the exhibition.
Holding Pattern is a desktop installation piece, and the precursor to Holding Pattern (no.2), which can be found in the Current Works section of this site. It is a meditation on the vast reserve of resources needed to maintain the (mostly illusory) potential for travel from anywhere, to anywhere, at any time, which Global Capitalism requires to function (or at least to appear to function). More about this piece can be found in the Process Journal for Holding Pattern (no.2).
In Flatland, a two-part video installation piece, the entire surface of the Earth (as depicted by Google Maps and the technologies / infrastructures which power it) was printed out in a single continuous stream. Rendered in this way, the Earth is visible only as the two-dimensional output of an all-producing, three-dimensional machine. The original installation was dismantled at the end of the exhibition.
Click here to view video documentation
Perfect Calm is a desktop installation / projection piece which takes a playful look at ‘calming nature’ screensavers, as well as ‘relaxing nature sounds’ videos, inverting the usual relationship to them in intentionally unsubtle ways.
Click here or here to view video documentation
