We human beings are complex. To function, we create systems — institutions, cultural norms, and other structures — that reduce and simplify that complexity.
What is lost in the process? Can we ever really be seen for all that we are? Can we ever really know another?
Introduction to the work
My work often begins with personal experiences of evaluation, categorization, judgment, and misunderstanding. Rather than documenting those experiences directly, I use them to explore broader patterns of human behavior.
Autobiographical? Sort of. I am willing to use myself and my experiences as the guinea pig.
The work is organized into three ongoing projects.
Terms & Conditions examines the systems through which people are evaluated.
Objects of Measurement considers the objects through which people measure, assign, and communicate value.
Taxonomy of Imagined Lives explores the performance of authority, aspiration, expertise, and identity.
TERMS & CONDITIONS
Under Continuous Review
In this work, I pair AI-generated portraits with a short fragment of human narrative (“the human bit”) and system-generated evaluations.
The portraits do not depict real individuals. They function as stand-ins for people routinely evaluated, classified, and judged by institutions.
The evaluations operate mostly independently of the narratives provided for the subject. At times, “the human bit” is ignored by the system altogether. That is the system’s decision.
I designed and coded the system, but once activated, it runs without my intervention.
Under Continuous Review builds as an archive of records. Systems do not simply evaluate people; they shape how people are understood. Assessments of performance become assumptions about character. Evaluations begin to stand in for understanding.
What is lost when institutional judgments become a way of seeing one another?
Enter the archive to view all 85 records.
Procedural Dispossession
Procedural Dispossession draws from a personal archive of verbatim emails and corporate communications collected over a 30+ year corporate career. Presented as independent text fragments, the messages are removed from their original context and stripped of identifying details.
Taken together, they reveal how authority is reinforced through tone, repetition, and implied compliance.
This institutional language gradually becomes a primary way of relating to one another. As people become records, cases, employees, applicants, and stakeholders, human relationships are translated into administrative ones. Human beings are told they are now dotted lines. Their performance is characterized as "insecure."
What happens when we speak to one another in this way?
Organizational Cartography
Role Clarification
Merit Framing
Temporal Foreclosure
Enter the archive to view all records.
Credibility Index
Credibility Index imagines what it would look like if institutions actually quantified and scored perceptions of human credibility.
The system is provided with basic demographic information and a random set of observed behaviors or characteristics for a particular individual (referred to only by Case Number). As new information is introduced through an imagined interaction, credibility scores shift and change.
The project examines how trust is assigned, withdrawn, and redistributed. Credibility is often presented as an objective quality, but our judgments are shaped by assumptions, observations, expectations, and bias. The same person may be evaluated very differently by different observers. One observer sees commuting via public transit as evidence of good character; another sees it as worthy of a demerit.
What happens when trust becomes a score?
OBJECTS OF MEASUREMENT
Objects of Measurement examines the objects, interfaces, and everyday artifacts through which we attempt to understand one another.
Bodies, possessions, purchases, credentials, and personal choices are routinely treated as evidence. They become proxies for character, status, intelligence, desirability, belonging, and value. The size of a diamond in an engagement ring, a boarding pass, or a tape measure can quickly become the basis for an appraisal of worth.
What happens when objects become a way of seeing people?
Taxonomy of Imagined Lives
Taxonomy of Imagined Lives examines the stories we construct about ourselves and one another.
Across three related projects, the work explores how identities are inferred, imagined, revised, and projected through appearance, possessions, aspiration, and social signals. Faced with limited information, we quickly begin constructing narratives about who people are, how they live, what they value, and where they belong.
What stories do we tell when we don't know enough?
Series I: She’s Got It in the Bag
We construct stories about people from fragments of information.
Series II: Interventions
We construct improved versions of other people.
Series III: The Space You Deserve
We construct imagined lives through aspiration and status.
