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The Shape of Change is an art work that examines the perception of change, differentiation and independence in personal and political contexts through two projects. The first is an expanded sculpture project exploring the evolving nature of the United States’ relationship with Iraq, examining citizens’ concepts of political change, freedom, and civic agency; and creating a series of visualizations, sculptures and dialogs from the acquired data. The second is a musical performance generated by analyzing sound, image and movement data from the first months of a baby’s life as he learns to walk and speak. The sculpture work will explore the development of sovereign political states; the performance work will investigate the creation of human subjectivity. Comparing the two will portray the nature of separation and formation of identity, from a macro and micro perspective, as expressed through music and sculpture.

The sculpture project will visualize what American and Iraqi citizens feel would constitute meaningful political change as their two countries seek to function as independent, sovereign states. It will begin with people expressing their individual opinions about the meaning of political change, democracy, national identity, and independence through an on-line form or direct interview. Information will be archived in an open source database and be used to generate online data visualizations and physical sculptures to help contextualize the material in new ways. On line respondents will be able to see their information in the context of the larger data cloud, to help consider how their voice relates to local, national and international opinion. Visualizations can be dynamically reconfigured according to location, keyword and date indices. Visualizations will be dynamic, evolving as answers vary according to changing political conditions. The project will be further contextualized through community dialog, as paired American & Iraqi cities discuss issues that arise from the visualizations in a series local public conversations. The exchanges will be transcribed in book form by laser cutting text out of a series of earlier declassified documents that defined the US / Iraq relationship over the last 10 years, thus underscoring the project theme of creating a series of cumulative, sculptural texts.

To contribute your opinions to the project, please fill out the form here.

The second project will be an improvisational music performance created from a digital score, made by analyzing patterns of sound (speech), image (drawings), and movement (crawling, walking, running), data gathered during the 8th – 24th months of my new baby’s life. Each month, my child’s movement, vocalizations and markings will be recorded and digitized as he learns to move and speak on his own, and thus begin the process of separating himself as an individual. Data will be analyzed for persistence, change, shape and pattern through custom software (written in Processing). Information will be processed to create a series of drawings to be displayed together as an animation, that will serve as a projected musical score, for improvisational musicians to interpret in performance. By analyzing the evolving cycles and patterns, music and image will trace the child’s formation of his own individual agency.