media: real-time javascript code, real-time max/msp code, desktop computer, organza fabric sheets, projectors, speakers
exhibitions: Anthropocene Consequences at Watershed Art and Ecology, curated by Claire Pentecost and Brian Holmes. November 2025.
Essay:
When I was a kid, I heard a story that when you see a rainbow, you see a different rainbow than those around you. I was told, maybe by a science teacher, that this was because of light's play across water droplets, which difract like a prism and beam through the sky to reach my situated perceptual system.
This summer I remembered this story. After peeling my ass off the sidewalk outside a party as the sun was rising, my boyfriend held my hand as we walked into the supermarket as they opened their doors for the day. Plied with snack foods, revitalized by an optimism of commericalized abundance, I melted into the passenger seat and they drove us home.
Riding along in silence, we noticed a rainbow, which, for me, ushered a vector of experience distinct from any rainbow I had seen before, because perception itself brings my capacity for feeling to bear.
In this moment, we might protest: you recognized the visual stimuli of the rainbow from your previous experiences, your state of being was irrelevant to the being of the rainbow.We might feel that fact are matters of the utmost importance, We may even feel it important to declare that my feeling's bearing on perception is unimpo rtant, that the rainbow’s singularity is a smoke and mirrors trick.
But this is an abstraction that holds feeling to be the mere seasoning of sensation. Our world is caught in the snarls of a troublesome schism, a bad habit of thought, where there is the natural world, and then there is what what we perceive and feel.
What if the rainbow's differencing is not an exception but the rule?
Nature is what we are aware of in perception: relational resonces across clouds and light, friends and lovers, earth and sky, actual and possible. Values, feelings, emotions, these all bear upon awareness.
Perception does what becomes done; what's done secretes new possibilities for doing. And so the world is continuously reborn; mutual perception produces sensuous becomings, folding in and unfolding waves of actualizing potentials. Reality has less to do with consensus. Reality is the field of sensuous solidarity of an always-in-process dissensus. Our project then is to make sense in common.
Perception transmutes relation into reality. Not every thing perceives every thing, but every thing perceives, and is perceived, and your being perceived and perceiving mutually implicates you in the world’s web, fluttered by perception's movement.
Publication:
"Difference's Rainbow", The Non-Standard, vol. 1, no. 3.