STATEMENT preforming my live "komputartoon" in 2000 I make mental exercises. Art and music are not simply decorative, but parts of a neurological strategy for us to understand our surroundings. The mind creates a compulsion in every living person to interact socially and then to make some sort of art (which we might succumb to or not). Due to each artist's individual interests and curiosities, the resulting artwork presents others with novel mental puzzles. Thus art is essentially the brain's strategy for further fine-tuning its own ability to comprehend our ever-changing, immediate environments. This is why I make the art I make. Themes * Computers Are Silly: People often take these machines so seriously! I am not into the whole sci-fi thing. Some folks are so interested in the future, that they miss aspects of the present. The "what if" mentality that drives us to keep striving for something better, just on the horizon, is ultimately a distraction keeping us from the issues at hand. Artificial Intelligence might be possible, but it is unlikely. The same way that the odds of alien abductions, winning the lottery, perpetual motion machines and cold fusion are so astronomically small, the numbers become insignificant. But rounding is a bit subjective. I might round the odds to zero, while someone more enthusiastic about imagining "what if" scenarios might round up. So it is popular to believe that computers and programing have infinite potential and may eventually surpass our abilities. In some things they clearly have. But in many, in our desperation to to realize this belief, the definition of "technology" is undergoing significant alterations. We are placing the need to justify faith before the real events. Programming is merely a matter of translating what you want to say into overly simplistic terms. Instead of saying "Just make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich", you have to explain how to unscrew the lids every time. Computers are that dumb. * Gestalt and Cognition: There is a big difference between what we detect, and what we comprehend detecting. Sight and sound (and likely all sensory input) is filtered through Gestalt rules. What is literally happening "out there" is not always the impression we experience "in here". These pieces are examples where the mind of the person engaged plays an integral role in assembling meaningful stimuli. One important phenomenon, employed in a lot of these pieces, is constancy. There is constancy involved in seeing motion in rapidly substituted frames of film. Though often the physiology of the eye and the Gestalt effect in the mind cooperate, the mind also uses Gestalt to distinguish music from noise. You probably recall those old toys where a bird is depicted on one side of a chip, and a cage on the other. The chip is suspended between strings. Twirl it fast enough and it appears the bird is in the cage. We may intellectually know better, but perceive many such optical illusions involuntarily. Perhaps we are projecting our own cages onto the bird? * Sensory Substitution: Sensory Information is arbitrary. The brain receives millions of impulses at a time that are not synchronized. Our minds are a landfill of impulses. The brain says something like "This chunk reminds me of an image, so I will send it to the visual cortex... This chunk reminds me of a sound, so I will send it to the audio cortex." But (very probably) there is no real information about where each impulse came from. Just as looking at bit of garbage in a dump, one can only guess which specific truck brought it there. These pieces are about lending one brain module, or set of processing functions, in monitoring some other modality. Likewise the computer normally does make the distinction between audio and video (and does not normally deal with things like smells and has no somatosensensory map). Nonetheless, these abilities can be built (mechanically or programatically), customized, etc. Audio input, for instance, really just provides us with a list of numbers, which can then be applied to visual things. In response, the computer may display graphic animation, but the brain can also recognize musicality and sends a copy of the input data to be processed in a way we normally assume is exclusive to sounds. The computer can than be useful as a tool for coercing unlikely mental processes.