Haymarket RIOT

Haymarket RIOT was an early collaboration with sociologist Jonathon Epstein that treated media theory as something to be made, not only written. We were interested in visual sociology, hyperreality, postmodern theory and the emerging condition in which culture was becoming image, signal, fragment and loop.

The work included proto-meme GIFs, theory animations, video and multimedia pieces that asked what abstract systems might look like when forced into popular and electronic media. This was before social media made theory-as-image a common language. At the time, the question was simple and useful: what does theory look like when text is no longer enough?

Haymarket RIOT is one of the origins of my later tactical media and virtual performance work. It established the idea that a moving image, interface or short loop could function as an argument. It also began my interest in turning academic language inside out through media formats that could circulate, mutate and misbehave.