By mid-2009 I had mostly abandoned using the machines to reproduce images in favor of exploring space and duration. I had realized immediately that I was more interested in the breakdown or distortion of the image than the image itself. This led me to pursue distortions spatially (and sometimes via intentional/unintentional machine failure) and I began to use the machines to do simpler and simpler things, preferring to allow the complex images to emerge as a result of the way these simple algorithms mapped onto and were distorted by the space of the "performance" and often my own body. However, I have occasionally returned to printing images with this spatial focus in mind, for example in the "good heavens bad heavens" instant photographs of 2011 and the 22" x 22" medium format piece of the same title for the Essl Museum in Vienna (Nov. 2011 - Apr. 2012).

Also, I feel a note on digital vs. analogue photography is important here as these years marked a turning point for me in the documentation of my machine work. Early in 2008, I was still using digital photographs to capture my work but by the middle of that year I had abandoned it for two reasons. First, I was interested in challenging the assumption of photography as fundamentally "reproducible" as well as inverting the relationship between performance and documentation. In these works, something emerges in the long exposure documentation of the performance that was not present to the observers of the performance in real time. The documentation brings something new to the work rather than being an archive which seems lacking with respect to the original event of performance, a direct challenge to Roland Barthes' assertion that "In the photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else...." (see "self-portrait with Gertrude and Alice and Roland" below). The photographic object helps to bring these issues to the front in ways digital photography didn't for me. After one performance, when people were gathering around the instant photograph I had placed on the stage, I overheard someone taking a dozen shots of it with his digital camera say, "How sad! After all that it's just an object that can't be shared??" It seemed fitting that this photographic object that exceeds the event itself can only be viewed one at a time. Held in your hands it becomes more rare and private than the performance in which something was missing. A digital photograph never takes on the character of a gift.

Occasionally my work with instant photography or film is read superficially as a nostalgic turn or a form of ludditism, but the second (although, I suppose probably the foremost) reason I moved away from digital photography was simply practical: my performances lasted sometimes over an hour and long exposure digital photographs were producing far too much digital noise over this duration. The black grounds of the works were speckled with red, green and blue pixels on the image sensor that had misfired due, basically, to digital boredom. The only way to get the pure, inky blacks I wanted was to turn to film. I initially turned to instant film because it was the only way to bring the photograph into the live performances and I stuck with it as a medium for the reasons of singularity and objecthood outlined above.

the work transmutes sound into visual composition. information into mass. format into sculptural form.

installation notes:
the first stack, the tallest, is 1663 pages, each page being ~.16 seconds of music.
the second stack, the shortest, is 116 pages, each page being ~2.34 seconds of music.
the third stack is 510 pages, each page being ~half a second of music.
the three stacks should be slightly above waist height on a single white plinth 33" wide by 18" deep.

(each edition consists of one printing of the work, certificate signed by both artists and digital copy of the images which may be reprinted by the buyer in accordance with guidelines laid out in the purchase agreement.)

what: newsprint, glue
when: spring 2012

david hockney claimed one couldn't look at a photograph for more than a split-second because that's all the time the photograph contained. as the chemistry of photography has advanced in the almost two centuries since Nicéphore Niépce's breathtaking photograph "View from the Window at Le Gras" (which took hours and hours of full sunlight to expose), the exposure times have become shorter and shorter. an hour. seven minutes. twelve seconds. half a second. one thousandth of a second. cwm's work uses time to interrogate the history of photography and reinterpretation its origins.

the photographs that result are documentation that exceeds the performance itself, a kind of archive of an event that, in a sense, never really took place. in this abstracted map of place (which often shares none of the minimalism of its performance) some details are highlighted and others obliterated. the level abstraction is often so high that these images constitute a map of time more than of space.

being is revealed to us through time. in our daily lives the immediacy of space is arresting; but, in these photographs, cwm suggests that it may be worthwhile to suspend this illusion of immediacy in order to step into the open of duration and receive anew the gift of being.

the image for the cover of Todd P's brooklyn newspaper is an artist proof of "and, body" (2012) pinned to a cork wall. the original work is one of eight 22" x 22" photographic c-prints in the New. New York show that opened in November 2012 at the Essl Museum in Vienna. the photograph was created using machines cwm built and uses to produce a kind of performance. here the artist poses in a small elevator for a long exposure photograph that takes approximately one and a half hours. during this hour and a half long performance the light projected from the machine traces the space and the artist's body creating an effect that is something like a relief etching of the scene. with an appearance somewhere between digital rendering and a complicated installation of neon lights, this work, shot on medium format negative and printed optically, interrogates the boundaries between digital and analog, photography and painting.

in this continuing series, the quality of line, shading, thick fiber-based paper and scale recall drawing, bringing it into dialogue with cwm's photographic process. as in most of his other photographic work, cwm builds machines to move light slowly through space. using long exposures of often more than an hour, the camera he constructed especially for this series records these "performances" directly onto 8"x10" photographic paper instead of negative film. thus, when the paper is developed, the caresses of light from the machines produce black lines on a white ground rather than white or red/colored lines on a black ground, as in his instant photographic pieces or the 22" x 22" works for the New. New York show at the Essl Museum in 2012.

the single "scientific" lenses used in the camera, provide no image correction (as compound photographic lenses do) so we see large optically dissolving bands of rough black with the texture of spray paint, stretched edges and other distortions. these optical aberrations are some of the only clues to the viewer that she is looking at a photographic object.

many aspects of the work undermine the assumption that photography is an objective tool for mechanically reproducing a moment of the world as we see it. the abstraction resulting from these simple lenses, the strange reality of an extreme telephoto lens (as used for some of the pieces in this series), the fact that each of the works is a singular object with no negative to reprint from, and the highly extended duration of the process. yet the images remain, despite the tendency towards abstraction, the archive of light in a space.

photography is always, in some sense, literal. the direct recording of light. in this sense, the optical is always faithful or even truthful. but it is its own truth. one very different from our own experience of the world, though this difference is so often concealed by the near-instantaneous shutter speeds and techniques of conventional photography. it is not a human truth.

in VPDEO GAME, you are playing the failure of the television to reproduce the signal generated by the electronics. the electronics generate a line bisecting the television screen with a block of color to the left of it. there are two buttons on top of the felt enclosure one shaped like a plus and the other shaped like a minus. pressing the plus and minus (adding and removing bass drums from the electronic drum sequence playing) changes the rate at which the electronics changes the color of that simple half-screen of color. sometimes the color changes are so fast that the television appears to tile the image in varying colors in intricate and unexpected ways across the screen. when the television starts to doubt it has a real video signal it flashes "VIDEO" in the upper right of the screen (but does not make the screen go black). you win the game by getting the television just confused enough that it starts to swap letters in and out: VPDEO, VIDMV, VISEO, etc. why the television does this is unknown. you make a note of the new letter combination and award yourself the points you think you deserve on the paper high score card.

it is late winter and the artist traverses the forest clearing, stopping at each tree to drink all of the maple sap that has collected in the bucket hanging from it. the scene is still but not bleak; hinting as much at the coming spring as at the receding winter. from the point of view of performance, drinking gallons and gallons of sap so quickly is both a feat and an (unwanted) indulgence.

the work is a response to eastman johnson's series of paintings from the 1860s in which free northerners revel as they gather sap and boil it down in large cauldrons to make maple syrup. at the time, maple syrup was an icon of abolitionism and freedom, as cane sugar production was possible only through the continued exploitation of slave labor along the gulf coast and in the caribbean. the divided video frame in this piece references the number of small studies johnson made for the large painting which he never produced.

the electronics generate a white line moving back and forth across a television screen--the intricate patterns that emerge result from the breakdown of the television's ability to "see" (and represent) this line as it moves faster and faster. as the velocity of the line increases, it appears to leave copies of itself in its trail and later, moving even faster, it fragments into smaller and smaller segments which assemble into delicate woven patterns, spinning helices and noisy fields of light. this lengthy process creates a space for the viewer to consider the creative power and depth of line, the phenomenology of technology and the fecundity of communication error.

Solo Shows
2014
“Bored Horny” drawings at The Jacqueline Falcone Bed & Breakfast, Miami, FL USA (forthcoming)

Group Shows
2014
“Figure Found” at Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, MA USA (forthcoming)

2013
“red and figure” and “for Josef and Anni” in “Fresh 10!” at Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn, NYC

2012
"and", eight 22" x 22" photographic c-prints in "New. New York", Essl Museum, Vienna, AT

2011
“Alice & Gertrude (Self-Portrait)”, medium format instant photograph, “Coming and Going”, NYCAMS, NYC

2009
“Lines”, six black and white photographs, N|F|P fashion show, NYCAMS, NYC
“Box I and II”, two 4’x4’ photographic c-prints, Sidedoor Gallery, NYC

2008
“Gertrude (windowpane)”, sculpture and photo exhibition, LEMUR, NYC
“VPDEO GAME”, drum sequencer video game in felt enclosure, Death By Audio, NYC
“Gertrude”, three days of interactive machine and photography installation, “Bent Festival”, NYC

2007
“Tikichips”, self-immolating microcontroller-based sound sculpture, Stain, NYC
“Hell Yup!: DJ Candy”, in “Kunst und Musik mit dem Tageslichprojektor”, Moltkerei Werkstatt, Köln, Germany
“Sad Sandy The Self-Destructive Sculpture” (with Kunal Gupta), self-sanding sculpture, “Build/Decay”, NYC

2005
“Dignatty”, generative sound installation, in “Nhebraska Noisefest”, The Tank, NYC

Selected Performances, Screenings and Publications
2013
“L’orgueilleux” trio for piano, flute and viola in “Not The Third Viennese School”, Hartford New Music Festival, Hartford, CT USA
“Sugaring Off” video piece screened as part of “New. New York: Other Worlds” at Votivkino, Vienna, AT

2012
"The Call: I" video piece screened as part of "New. New York Filmnacht" at Gartenbaukino, Vienna, AT

2012
"and figure, red" artist proof, cover of ShowPaper (issue 140), Brooklyn, NYC

2011
“Dork” in “The Musical Singularity: Music for Computer-Controlled Pipe Organ”, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT USA

2010
“Box” (with Mikael Karlsson), performed by Tabor Wind Quintet at Issue Project Room, NYC
“On This Planet” (with Mikael Karlsson), performed by Cedar Lake ballet at Festspielhaus, Baden-Baden, DE

2009
“Alice (Lines)”, in “Bent Festival” at The Tank, NYC
“In The Photograph The Event Is Never Transcended For The Sake Of Something Else”, The Banff Centre, CA
“Life Class” (with Mikael Karlsson), sound installation for François Rousseau’s “Atelier”, Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris, FR

2008
“Gertrude (lightning)”, Galleri Jonas Kleerup, Stockholm, Sweden
“Gertrude (JurassicPiksel)”, PikselFest, Bergen, Norway
“Gertrude”, machine choreography for Loud Objects performance as part of Evolution Festival, Leeds, UK
“Sound and Vision [DOPPLER ATTACK!]”, a declaration of war on a physical law, with microcontroller-based video and sound, in Sculpting Voice, curated by Lesley Flanigan at MonkeyTown, NYC

2007
“Everybody’s Autobiography” (text by Gertrude Stein), music for voice and electronics commissioned and performed by Anne Rhodes at Neverending Books, New Haven, CT USA

2006
“I’m afraid they misled me, though I let them”, music for cello, electronic tiara and amplified sweatband; commissioned by and performed with Rachel Gawell at An Die Musik Live, Baltimore, MD USA
“Five Songs About Distance”, film and sound installation, Center for the Arts Cinema, Middletown, CT USA

2005
“the Open”, outdoor sound installation, Middletown, CT USA

2003
“Landscape” (music for a 16mm film by Jessica Duffett), Broad Performance Space, Claremont, CA USA

2001
“Adamsong”, composition and performance at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA USA

Commissions and Awards
2009
“Box” (with Mikael Karlsson), sound sculptures and composition commissioned by Tabor Quintet

2006
Juan Roura-Parella Prize for outstanding interdisciplinary thesis in art, music and intellectual history at Wesleyan University

2002
“Essay” (text by Jessica Duffett), composition commissioned by Wesleyan New Music Ensemble

it was as true in the chauvet cave thirty thousand years ago as it was a half-century ago that man can only truly occupy space—be it terrestrial or celestial—by impregnating it with human sensibility. building machines and placing them in dialogue with architectural space, light and camera, cwm considers how technology both accelerates and cripples our project of filling time and space in order to exist in it. in the "lines" (2009), "box"(2008), "grid" (2010), "bodies" (2011), "for josef" (2008),  and "good heavens / bad heavens" (2011) pieces, the machines he created slowly move points of light through a space or project light onto surfaces. captured with long exposure photography, the images produced are a kind of unpredictable dialogue between an (often simple and often somewhat random) machinic performance and the concrete space in which the light materializes. consecutive parallel lines crawl off into the distance. a patch is violently torn from a spiraling pattern and twisted and contorted into a messy nest in the foreground of the image, the grid--that paragon of scientific metrics--deliquesces into a series of fluid folds, etc. the spaces are written upon by the machines--a writing that leaves no permanent mark on the space itself but is preserved in the photograph like some species of futuristic cave drawing whose documentation exceeds the fragile and fleeting original.

generosity of time is a sustaining force in the machine photography pieces--the purposefully slow-moving machines sometimes taking more than an hour or two to run their course--as it is in some of cwm's other work in sound and video. expanding on klein's suggestion that we can only conquer space through impregnating it with human sensibility, in these pieces cwm explores how we can fill time in order to inhabit it. in "ascension (1up)", a fragment of michael jackson's "Man in The Mirror" is processed and repeated so that its key change becomes a continual step-by-step ascent into the sonic stratosphere--after half an hour the pitch is so high that even the original fragment's bass line is higher than a piccolo and by the end of the piece another half hour later all that remains is a barely perceptible, heavenly shimmer.

filling time with these repeated procedures cwm calls new forms into being. in "moving line" (2007, 2012), a vertical line is picking up speed as it moves left and right across a large television screen. in this extended duration (the piece lasts about four hours), as the line moves faster and faster, the television fails to accurately "see" the line and starts to represent it as broken fragments of line. but in this failure, the line becomes so broken that its tiny twisted fragments are wiped over the screen forming new complex diamonds melting into curved helices at times appearing three-dimensional as they rotate on the screen. this exploration of the rich topology of the line is something of a monomania for cwm--how much one dimension can bare! the complexity of these patterns is so far beyond the computational power of the electronic components in the cwm's circuit generating the video signal: so through this slowly degrading process of serendipitous technological failure, the work seeks to achieve what is strictly beyond its abilities and through the generosity of time and failure the impossible is achieved.

cwm lives and produces his work at his farm in killingworth, connecticut where he also runs a retreat-style music production studio, killingworthsound. he was drawn to music at an early age and by ten had taught himself how to program computers. those two passions fused over the years into a practice of electronic music that eventually led him to explore visual art. the richly poetic musical performances of robert ashley, the early performance art-like text pieces of composer lamonte young and the visual work of musicians like john cage were tantalizing examples of what was possible. he approached marcel duchamp through cage's work and was mesmerized by the visual results of dicing with authorial death. musical works like yves klein's "monotone symphony" were further proof of what the other side had to contribute not just visually but musically. and in cwm's work of the last few years, his growing passion for abstract, minimalist and conceptual artists such as barnett newman, agnes martin, yoko ono, kazimir malevich and joseph beuys is apparent. they may appear wildly unique in the appearance of their work but each is a utopian deeply moved by the transformative power of ideas when embodied in the materials of art. those ideas drove them to explore a wide variety of materials with which they each had varying degrees of success yet they were not primarily painters or sculptors but artists whose work originates first and foremost in an aesthetic confrontation. that confrontation bleeds into the viscera and returns finally to the mind bringing an idea that is now coupled with the explosive power of that confrontation with space and time.