Grasping at Bits

Grasping at Bits: Art, Resistance, and Control in the Digital Age is one of the works that most clearly names my long-term concerns. It is a hyperessay, but it is also an interface, a map and a tactical media object. It looks at intellectual control, cultural ownership, digital art and the ability of networked systems to enclose or open cultural possibility.

The work belongs to a moment when net art, activist media and digital culture were negotiating the terms of ownership. File sharing, intellectual property, corporate expansion and artist networks were all changing the meaning of public culture. I wanted the form of the work to behave like the argument: nonlinear, linked, unstable and resistant to a single path.

The title remains useful because so much of my work involves grasping at pieces of systems that cannot be held whole: bits, scans, avatars, pixels, prompts, gestures, legal structures and fragments of mediated reality.