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My mother died suddenly in April 2023. One of my family members offered words of comfort that resonated with me. He said, “She’s still here, but we can’t perceive her.” The statement made me wonder about the process of transitioning from an embodied state of being. As an artist working primarily with the concept of embodiment, this new drawing series allows me to explore and process my thoughts and ideas through the lens of remembrance.

The first three drawings in the 0(zero)body drawing series presented here are informed by time I spent gazing at Lake Michigan and its skies, with my back to the bustling city of Chicago. During these moments, I envisioned loved ones who have passed away becoming part of the non-human world. I imagined myself in this future scenario as well. This series of drawings conceptualizes a body distributed among clouds after a particular storm, using computational vector drawings, motion capture data, and a watercolor palette that approximates the colors of the sky on a specific day.

My mother died suddenly in April 2023. One of my family members offered words of comfort that resonated with me. He said, “She’s still here, but we can’t perceive her.” The statement made me wonder about the process of transitioning from an embodied state of being. As an artist working primarily with embodiment as a driving topic of my inquiry, this new body of work allows me to work through hypotheses about remembrance.

The aquerra series is a body of work inspired by the idea of a 0(zero)body, or a body that has undergone a process of disembodiment through death and reintegration/redistribution. The series presents a self-contained world where water acts as a symbol of immersive and fluid virtuality. The first in the series, aquerraA, imagines a transition from legibility to its opposite through automated electronics and offers transitional guides in the form of customized kit-bashed toys. It’s a poetic narrative about the ultimate habitat-switching awaiting us all.

In 2014, I was struggling to understand what it meant for me to make work as a trans person. There was at the time a lot of pressure to be visible and a belief that visibility was a pathway to securing political advancements for trans rights. I was encouraged to make work that in hindsight feels very exposing, including a nude self portrait sculpture in bronze. Self Portrait (as fog) is a gesture at reclaiming my right to appear (or not) in public. This work recasts the 2014 figure into two fog forms, thereby obscuring the original figure and continuing my ongoing exploration of fog as an aspirational figure for trans embodiment.

Poem in the form of a custom View-Master disc, presented for this exhibition on a vintage View-Master (Model-E from 1950s). The text of poem reads (each line is contained on a single slide):

“To be trans for me is to whirl and waft in between,
and in that motion expose and complicate the strictures of my life.
It is to be like fog, to settle and roil between fixed objects.
To exist in a negative space is to accentuate and complicate that which you are between.
As the fog complicates the street corner,
I complicate the normative structures my fluid body comes into contact with.
I may not change them directly but they surely change when seen in relation to me.”

A tool for resisting clarity, this work invites viewers to remystify their surroundings by seeing as/through fog. Viewers are welcome to try out the frames provided, take a template home with them to create their own, or print their own using this link:

https://chelsea.technology/assets/docs/fog-framing-thompto.pdf

The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) oversees the activities of seventeen agencies that make up the US Intelligence Community, which have been engaged in the surveillance of US and foreign citizens, extraordinary rendition, and extrajudicial acts of torture.

The SSCI routinely releases documents about their oversight activities to the public. While these documents are created using word-processors and ought to be accessible using digital methods (such as search, copy, paste, and screen readers and other accessibility-based assistive technologies), many are published on the SSCI’s web hearing archive as unsearchable low-resolution images of text.

Operational Character Rendition (OCR) renders visible the computational processes involved in “reading” these documents available on the SSCI’s website, letter by letter. In this work, the computer algorithm is tasked with identifying each letter of each word in order to transform the document from a grainy picture of text into a legible text document. This task is accomplished by comparing each word against authoritative lists such as a standard spelling dictionary and a list of “watch words” (displayed in red) used by Department of Homeland Security analysts to monitor social media accounts. When an exact match cannot be determined, the words cycle through the nearest matches.

The piece can be viewed on modern browsers at https://oversightmachin.es/ocr/

Findings from this exhibition can be found at https://oversightmachin.es/findings/slash

What forms of technology and computation will survive the salt water of the ocean, the salt water of our tears? For this piece, I use textiles patterned with a speculative botany and conductive thread nets and embroidery to explore intimate geographies and the practice of queer computation as a mode of survival and world making despite imperial science and its residue.

An Archive of Witch Fever includes a vessel to tune in, consisting of human hair and conductive fishing nets that transmit songs and stories through AM radio. The counterpart to the vessel is imperial science, which relies on expeditions, collections, and cataloging to make models and diagrams of the entire world. On the ground is clothing from oceanic passages and migration, patterned with a speculative botany created using machine learning from British botanical illustrations and archival images of trans-Pacific plantations in the 1900s. The conductive thread embroidery is magnetized and encoded with binary information as a form of embodied, soft data storage. This piece creates an archive as practice for the future and forgetting, waves of information and waves of migration, electromagnetic waves that pass through us, waves that we absorb, waves that we transmit.