I have been locating the emotional potential of the dial. Like so many other scientific objects, the dial is both functional and suggestive. An indicator that displays and transcends the display of a measurement, the dial reveals its subject’s current state. A series of dials (like the abundance found in a control room monitoring one or many subjects) provides a larger view: a multi-faceted assessment of overall position and general well-being at any particular moment. Such an array reveals the complexity of that moment – of any given moment – and, as follows, the complexity of all moments. The processes of locating, measuring, and evaluating shift from the scientific to something more visceral.

I had been researching the technologies of satellites, telescopes and systems of precise timekeeping. Although made exclusively for the collection and transmission of information, these instruments and the data they collect are more than esoteric science. What constitutes data, anyway? Data (information) and the collection of data (narratives surrounding information) can be interpreted emotionally, psychologically, expansively.

By pairing abstraction and ‘informative’ display, my drawings, animations, sound work and installations put forth my expansive interpretation of this information and the monitoring processes that produce it. It is as much an intellectual process as an emotional one. Inventing the slow, abstract narratives that surround these technologies – the dials in control rooms were the symbolic point of entry for my latest installation and planetarium show – allows for the transformation of this data from something grounded in scientific reality into something completely new.