My creative practice explores the intersection between artistic and scientific modes of visualizing data. In my early work I focused on issues of bodily representation. In my interactive installations from 1999-2001, I created interfaces that required viewers to physically participate in the act of “seeing” bodies of flesh, bodies of information, and bodies in motion. For example, in the interactive installation, Nosce Te Ipsum (2000), the viewer “dissects” a human form composed of media images of idealized bodies and then confronts a real-time video image of their own face unexpectedly lodged within the gigantic collage.

More recent installations from 2000-2004 ascribe interface control and content management to animal agents—bodies unaware of their participation in the artwork. In Follow the Mouse (2001), I replace a traditional input device with its namesake, a live mouse whose movement in the cage creates drawings on the computer monitor. Much of the new work that deals with monitoring is a response to surveillance culture. In Fishbowl (2003), a goldfish controls the video feed from four underwater spy cameras. In Your face is safe with me (2004), the viewer examines the imagery generated by the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art’s closed circuit television system in the context of a videogame—occasionally seeing themselves in the piece.

In 2001, the author was awarded a design commission from the J. Paul Getty Research Institute. This commission resulted in the development of an art work that utilized the image feed from existing surveillance cameras lodged within the infrastructure of the Getty Museum’s galleries that were then devoted to an exhibition titled “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen.” In the process of creating the commission titled Mazed, the author became more familiar with the vast quantity of sensors and related hardware being integrated into institutional architecture. Nearly all of this high-tech computerized equipment was concealed from public view. Mazed provided a commentary and a public window on the automated surveillance systems hidden in so many of our buildings. According to art historian Barbara Stafford, “Holmes’s splintering maze reminds us of the process; that the beholder is always mapped into the instrument and always leaves traces in the system.” This prior research ultimately led the author to the current project that focuses on visualizing another hidden dataset in contemporary architecture—the usage of key resources such as electricity and water.