cusps (Installation view) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

This software analyzes the audio signals and uses this data to synthesize three real-time video signals that are projected back onto the electronics.

cusps (Detail) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

The light from these projections in turn affects the characteristics of the audio circuitry.

cusps (Detail) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Through this continual process, the independence of discrete events becomes indiscernible as catastrophic relationships continually sculpt the network’s ecology.

cusps (Installation view) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Theoretical texts that informed the direction of this project were passed through custom software that revealed ruptures and loops within the texts. When printed, these idiosyncrasies were accentuated by the use of a font whose (incorrect?) programming presents atypical behavior in response to traditional word processing commands.

cusps (Installation view) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Presented as an installation in a darkened room, cusps invites audience members to be absorbed in its immersive environmental qualities, or to approach its materials as intimate crafted objects.

cusps (Print detail) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Standing as an attempt at the extreme of the singular (a thing of things; a sum without defined parts), cusps is an opportunity to observe levels that are higher/larger than that of the event, the actor, the area of focus, and the 1:1.

cusps (Print detail) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Simultaneously an ecosystem and a scenario, its materials and methods have been selected for their external dependencies. Their behaviors - reliably unpredictable - reflect their responses to their environment, an ecology that is subject to limitless variations and nuances. While each component - computer code, light-sensitive circuit, projected video, fragment of research - is designed to execute a task, their efforts generate expanses of loosely-patterned outcomes that can only exist through forms of catastrophic influence upon on another.

cusps (Print detail) 

Light-sensitive electronics, real-time digital video, text. Dimensions variable.

Micro-details and tiny tropes nudge cycles and trends into almosts and never-quite-agains. And repeat.

———-

“Catastrophes are the poetry of systems.”

DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF SYSTEMS

Incorporating models of system architecture from fields including information theory, network theory, mathematics, the social sciences, and signal processing, I organize particular components (custom software, electronics, audio and visual signal processing, text, networked distribution channels, improvisational music, performative activities, etc.) into arrangements that will generate a product that is the macro-result of the emergent interactions of all components at once.

CULTIVATION OF CATASTROPHES

Where self-sustaining systems tend toward stability and stasis, catastrophes - in the form of jumps, ruptures, or divergences - cause dramatic, unexpected shifts in patterned behavior, leading to remarkably dynamic waves of instability that spread throughout the fabric of these systems. Presuppositions about hierarchies, formal organizations, agency, cohesion, order, subjectivity, linearity, progress, and intention are questioned, denied, or revitalized in light of catastrophic events, and new modes of exhilaration arise as we navigate these webs of shaggy causality and accidental opportunities.

Edward Breitweiser is an Illinois-based artist, writer, and musician.