# wtkns.com ## Intro I am a media-critical artist working with real-time and algorithmic video in performance, installation, and videographic essay. I'm also an academic library professional focused on inclusive excellence and institutional accountability. This website is my repository for notes, research, and project documentation. It is also an invitation to [collaboration](mailto:[email protected]) and a perpetual work in progress. Please note that some links may be secured and some code may be experimental. ## 010 - Projects ### 000 - Ongoing #### [[000-Strange Light-Abstract|Strange Light]] (2025, Videographic, Ongoing)  A multi-part videographic exploration of the recurring forms or [[Media History and Archaeology Index|"topos"]] of composed and projected light, from shadow puppetry and the camera obscura---to the kaleidoscope and color organ---to twentieth century abstract film and light art---and including contemporary interactive installations and immersive media. This is an ongoing work in progress, with a partial draft of one video from a planned series of eight. **References include:** [[Karen Barad]], [[Errki Huhtamo]], [[Siegfried Zielinski]], [[R. Bruce Elder]], and others. [[000-Strange Light-Abstract|More Information]] #### PORTALS (Passage Oracle for Realtime Transformation And Luminous States) (2025, Performance, Ongoing) **PORTALS** is a real-time, midi-controlled, performance sequencer for transforming and compositing multichannel video, created as an ongoing collaboration with [The Invisible Mountain.](https://www.invmntn.com/)[Code](https://github.com/wtkns/PORTALS) is written in in Python and Touchdesigner.  #### Improvised Real Time Abstractions (2024, Performance, Ongoing) My hybrid performance and studio practice combines the analog light-art traditions of [[Liquid Light Shows]] and [[Thomas Wilfred]]'s [[Lumia]] with the foregrounded processes seen in Live Coding and Live Composition practices. I layer pigments, oils, and optical materials including lenses, mirrors, and glass beads, on a lighted table to produce shifting reflections, refractions, distortions. Live video of these evolving textures is further manipulated in TouchDesigner and streamed in real time, sometimes accompanied by generative algorithmic sound from a modular synthesizer patch. The performances are improvisatory and deliberately informal. Ephemeral moments emerge, transform, and dissolve. What is shared is not only the visual abstractions, but the cycle of artistic creation.    --- ### 100 - Videographic Essays #### [[Occularia]] (2025)  This videographic essay explores the visionary and physiological dimensions of early cinema through a remix of experimental, narrative, and scientific films. It invites viewers to consider cinema as an interface with the neurological systems of perception, a technology of affective state-change capable of inducing anagogic (mystical) states of consciousness. The essay reframes these films of early cinema as reflexive experiments into the brain’s response to rhythmic visual stimulation, and as essays of affective and cognitive inquiry, long before the work of Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits, and others. **References include:** [[R. Bruce Elder]], [[Tom Gunning]], [[J.D. Lewis-Williams]], [[Michael Betancourt]], [[Heinrich Klüver]], [[P. Adams Sitney]] [[Occularia|More Information]] --- #### [[Children of the Night, Extravagant Monsters]] (2024)  This remixes film, music videos, and live performance to present a rhizome of connections in the evolution of Queer Camp, Genderfuck, and Afrofuturist aesthetics. Many of the performances presented here extend beyond troubling gender and expand the domain of drag to depict subjects with speculative, unfamiliar, and sometimes unintelligible forms and features, and alien temporalities, ontologies, and epistemologies.  **References include:** [[LaMonda Horton Stallings]], [[José Esteban Muñoz]], [[Sonny Nordmarken]], [[Caterina Nirta]], [[Susan Stryker]], [[Jack Halberstam]] and others. **Performers include:** [[Children of the Night, Extravagant Monsters|More Information]] --- #### [[Automatic Menagerie]] (2024)  The trope of constructing magical beings to serve human rulers transcends cultures. This piece considers parallels in those stories and proposes a decolonial corolary to the "hero's journey." The "path of the constructed subject" is the perennial story of beings denied the claim to human status navigating colonial indoctrination, surveillance, and discipline with realness, resistance, or reproduced normativity. This was a response to the widespread social discourse that AI and generative art tools pose a threat to the "soul" of an American middle-class reliant on colonialist exploitation. **References include:** [[Fred Moten]], [[Gerald Vizenor]], [[Homi K. Bhabha]], [[K. Wayne Yang]], [[Antonio Gramsci]] [[Automatic Menagerie|More Information]] --- #### [Silhouette and Shadow](https://youtu.be/uQJ4onFBRUk?si=DHGTKgOqTZJDScWH) (2024)  A short voiceover video essay on [[Lotte Reiniger]]'s early animated feature *The Adventures of Prince Achmed*, with attention paid to the contributions of [[Walter Ruttman]], [[Bertolt Bartosch]], [[Oskar Fischinger]]. --- ### 200 - Performance and Installation Art #### [[Oramalith]] (2023) The Oramalith (seeing stone) is a viewing apparatus for 360° cylindrical video image, constructed of a projector, hemispherical mirror and a simple muslin screen stretched between two quilting hoops. There is a 360° camera rig using the same principle for producing prerecorded video or for closed circuit feed. Any torus shaped video will wrap around the cylinder. ![[oramalith.jpg]] ![]()  #### A Tightly Coupled Network of Reflexively Interconnected Nodes Embedded in a Matrix of Analogous Nets (2022) This nine-channel video installation explores universal themes of ritualized human experience, both the everyday and the once in a lifetime (birth, death, marriage, coming of age, illness, bathing, eating, confession) on a 3x3 grid of constantly shifting, culturally diverse found footage. A central screen of an unpeopled landscape is the calm core around which these rituals revolve, while a 3D graph structure connects and disrupts the disparate visuals. Footage comprises the gamut of performance, from authentic, amateur self-performance of social media posts, documentary film clips, and constructed performances from cinema and television programming. Silent and perpetually evolving, the work reflects on how individual human lives across the globe are simultaneously distinct, reproduced, and entangled, intra-actions in a web of nature.  #### Mesh Collaborative (2016-2018) Mesh Collaborative was a computer network music collective that used real-time, cross-compositional systems to create synthetic sonic environments. Inspired by the Network Music Ensemble and other computer music pioneers, our small group created compositional tools and a performance framework for collaborative, real-time, networked, multichannel electroacoustic composition and performance. Mesh Collaborative’s sole public [performance](https://soundcloud.com/gifttapes/mesh-collaborative-february-3-2018?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing) on Feb. 3, 2018, at The Chapel performance space in Seattle, featured a single desktop computer performing digital synthesis in four channels, responding to UCP control messages sent by four human performers with laptops. This system, built using the SuperCollider programming language, was designed to exploit the inherent volatility of the network, complete with lag, race conditions, and possible system crashes. Performers included: [Jason E Anderson](https://jasoneanderson.net/), [RM Francis](https://www.rmfrancis.net/), [Jeff Huston](http://jeffreyalanhuston.com/) and myself. ### 300 Visual Music (2011-2012) Supercollider sound and visuals #### [Tongues](https://youtu.be/E0Ge-k7icu4?si=qPo1xqi0EjEc5ecS)  #### [Charon](https://youtu.be/Dyb6srVWuEM?si=wZuWXw-ILBjCJxvZ)  #### [Cosmognosis](https://youtu.be/KHkmYKRswAw?si=QoFgbS_saLT05N4u)  ### 400 Other Mediums #### 010.410 Interfaces and Instruments ##### [[Chronotus Staff]] (2022) A minimal upright electric string input device ![[chronotus staff.jpg]] ##### Osgood Box (2016) ![[osgood box.jpg]] ##### Bible Amp ![[bible amp 2.jpg]] #### 010.420 Printmaking/Bookbinding ##### Dream Journal ![[dream journal.jpg]] ##### The Tale of Satampras Zeiros ![[satamprasZeiros2.jpg]] ##### Christmas Strategies ![[christmas strategies.jpg]] #### 010.430 Puppetmaking/Drag ##### Grope ![[grope puppet.jpg]] ##### Slithy Tove ![[monsterdrag1.jpg]] #### 010.440 Textiles ##### Flower of Life Tapestry ![[flower tapestry.jpg]] ### 500 Community Building #### Images and video are being used by right of fair use for criticism, comment, scholarship, and research. If you have issues with my use of something, or if you use something you find here, I'd love to [hear about it](mailto:[email protected]). ![[jmswithglasses.gif]] *Updated: 2025-10-17*