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034_03_942-1005
034_03_942-1005
The largest global corporations have played one of the most significant roles in shaping the appearance and functionality of our world over the past several centuries. In the process, they have extracted extraordinary material wealth from the earth and transformed this material through the work of millions of employees into products and services.
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034_03_932-941
034_03_932-941
The largest global corporations have played one of the most significant roles in shaping the appearance and functionality of our world over the past several centuries. In the process, they have extracted extraordinary material wealth from the earth and transformed this material through the work of millions of employees into products and services.
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033_01_912-931
033_01_912-931
While building affordable housing on the West Side of Chicago, I came across this site of domestic objects that had been strewn across a vacant lot as if caught in a tornado. For me, the still life was poetic.
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032_01_911
032_01_911
This work traces Madison St. from its  origin in the east at Millennium Park to Pulaski Rd. in the west. Each print contains four photographs, two as if one was walking from west to east, and two as if one was walking from east to west. At a certain point, the perspective meet near The United Center, before continuing on their path moving to the east or the west.
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031_03_900-910
031_03_900-910
This series draws upon a vast archive of images that trace a history of uprisings, protests, riots, massacres, and revolutions that are connected to race while also juxtaposing those images to images that trace Late Capitalism in America.
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030_03_895-899
030_03_895-899
This series builds off of 027_03_732-751 by shifting the focus from fields of abstract geometric figures to the silhouettes of figures that can be associated with a particular object or the shape of the human body. Like the previous series, this field exists over a non-representational ground. In the process, a tension between the blurred field and a hard-lined field emerges.
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029_01_792-894
029_01_792-894
029_02_787-791 and 029_01_792-894 are particularly personally significant for me. They offer a journey through the neighborhoods adjacent to the neighborhood of Hyde Park in which I grew up.  These include Bronzeville, Washington Park, Englewood, and Woodlawn. When I grew up in Hyde Park in the late 1980s, these were neighborhoods that I was told were not to be entered because they dangerous. Today as I live on the Near West Side of Chicago, they remain neighborhoods that the news media reports as being very dangerous and plagued by significant gun violence. When one actually ventures into these areas, however, one finds less danger and more the traces of decades of disinvestment.
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029_02_787-791
029_02_787-791
029_02_787-791 and 029_01_792-894 are particularly personally significant for me. They offer a journey through the neighborhoods adjacent to the neighborhood of Hyde Park in which I grew up.  These include Bronzeville, Washington Park, Englewood, and Woodlawn. When I grew up in Hyde Park in the late 1980s, these were neighborhoods that I was told were not to be entered because they dangerous. Today as I live on the Near West Side of Chicago, they remain neighborhoods that the news media reports as being very dangerous and plagued by significant gun violence. When one actually ventures into these areas, however, one finds less danger and more the traces of decades of disinvestment.
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028_02_752-786
028_02_752-786
Like many series, 028_02_752-786 began with found material. In this case, the material was a considerable amount of wallpaper that had been removed from a dining room that I was about to renovate. The gold silk wallpaper had an incredible quality that made it difficult for me to discard. As I contemplated what to do with the many sheets, I was inspired by the gold ground and inherent flatness of the surface to explore a series of icon paintings tied to traditional icons painting on gold surfaces. Instead, however, of choosing to create images, I favored an iconoclast approach that depicted the person via text.
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027_03_732-751
027_03_732-751
This series of work reflects a turn away from events and histories, places and territories that exist in the world. In place of these subjects that have served as the focus of other works, I have chosen to explore the geometry and territory of the surface of the painting itself devoid of any external narrative. This has created an opportunity to focus strictly on what a painting can be as an autonomous entity through an explicit dialogue with the history of the medium.
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026_02_732-775
026_02_732-775
These drawings and the poems that precede them arose from the thesis work for the MFA that I received from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. For quite some time, I did not include these poems and drawings in what I consider my body of work. This was largely a result of what I felt was an unsuccessful initial presentation alongside images and paintings that, in reality, were really part of a different line of thought.
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026_08_731
026_08_731
The text is from the final the thesis of the MFA that I received from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. For quite some time, I did not include these poems and drawings in what I consider my body of work. This was largely a result of what I felt was an unsuccessful initial presentation alongside images and paintings that, in reality, were really part of a different line of thought.
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026_08_730
026_08_730
The text is from the final the thesis of the MFA that I received from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. For quite some time, I did not include these poems and drawings in what I consider my body of work. This was largely a result of what I felt was an unsuccessful initial presentation alongside images and paintings that, in reality, were really part of a different line of thought.
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025_03_726-729
025_03_726-729
The edge, center, surface, and field of the canvas are the concepts that drive the form of this series.  Each is concerned with delimiting borders in a variety of manners and at different stages of the formation of the work.  As this occurs, a space begins to form in which earth and sky take place as abstract colors and brush marks.  Throughout, an attempt is made to both contain and break free from the limits of the canvas.  This tension between elements offers a point of meditation that anchors the purpose of the work.
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024_03_725
024_03_725
023 and 024 represent the first works executed strictly with paint in this catalogue of work – though 017 comes close, ultimately utilizing both plaster and ink.  While others were executed both before and after, these exhibit a focus on geometry, territory, field, color, and event that dominate the more sustained focus on works – beginning with 025 in 2020 – created exclusively with paint and more concerned with the history, areas of focus, and future of that medium.
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023_03_724
023_03_724
023 and 024 represent the first works executed strictly with paint in this catalogue of work – though 017 comes close, ultimately utilizing both plaster and ink.  While others were executed both before and after, these exhibit a focus on geometry, territory, field, color, and event that dominate the more sustained focus on works – beginning with 025 in 2020 – created exclusively with paint and more concerned with the history, areas of focus, and future of that medium.
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022_09_723
022_09_723
The initial intention was to write a screenplay that told the story of several generations and how they interacted with the landscape stretching between a cattle ranch in Texas and the Stockyards of Chicago.  It was also concerned with the legacy of the Stockyards, Bertolt Brechts’ Joan of the Stockyards, and the story of Joan of Arc.  While the screenplay was written, the more successful work exists in the found images used to illustrate this story and the open narrative they suggest rather than one fixed by my imagination.
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021_09_722
021_09_722
The numerous vacant lots encountered while walking across the West Side of Chicago are striking.  They bear witness to the destruction that occurred during ’68 Riots following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and decades of under-investment.  This series within the broader work brings together archival images of the neighborhood dating back to the late 19th C., photos of the assassination and riots, local activists such as the Vice Lords, local industry such as the former headquarters of Sears, contemporary images, process photos, and collages.
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021_03_718-721
021_03_718-721
The numerous vacant lots encountered while walking across the West Side of Chicago are striking.  They bear witness to the destruction that occurred during ’68 Riots following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and decades of under-investment.  This series within the broader work is created through tracing remnants of demolished buildings with energetic patterns, using these objects to create folds, and ultimately creating a new territory from the resulting geometry that traces the chaos of the event.
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021_02_708-717
021_02_708-717
The numerous vacant lots encountered while walking across the West Side of Chicago are striking.  They bear witness to the destruction that occurred during ’68 Riots following the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and decades of under-investment.  This series within the broader work explores the surfaces of the buildings that might have been there through wallpaper, traces of textures, photographs, and empty forms created by a missing object.
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020_04_702-707
020_04_702-707
This series falls in line with the broader interest in sites that are about to face a moment of transformation – in this case, from a vacant lot to the home of a new Nobu Hotel.  The work the results uses material found on the site in combination with house paint and wood found on the site to create geometric patterns to create a compelling object catching light and raising questions in the receiver of its origin.
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019_04_698-701
019_04_698-701
The boundary between painting and sculpture, the limits of the frame, the relationship between abstraction and representation, and the way that monumental manufacturing efforts that have vanished beneath sprawling strip malls are remembered drive the content of this work.  It evolved from the photo series 010 to become these constructs.
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018_04_695-697
018_04_695-697
While much of my work is connected to places that I have lived and physical locations I’ve investigated in depth, this series arose somewhat randomly when I purchased a volume of the newspaper Le Temps from the year 1880 from the University of Chicago Library.  The work that resulted brought the death of Gustav Flaubert among other events to the surface while also providing an opportunity to draw on other materials themes running through my practice.
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018_02_689-694
018_02_689-694
While much of my work is connected to places that I have lived and physical locations I’ve investigated in depth, this series arose somewhat randomly when I purchased a volume of the newspaper Le Temps from the year 1880 from the University of Chicago Library.  The work that resulted brought the death of Gustav Flaubert among other events to the surface while also providing an opportunity to draw on other materials themes running through my practice.
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017_03_680-688
017_03_680-688
The relationship between photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture is an underlying theme tying together my work.  These paintings have their origin in photographs of I 90/94 – the major north-south highway in Chicago that divided and destroyed a number of neighborhoods when it was constructed.  Through abstraction, the geometry of the roadway is highlighted and through the materiality of the paint, ink, and plaster the force of the road comes to life.
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016_04_676-679
016_04_676-679
The transformation of the West Loop of Chicago from a meatpacking and produce district to a hub of restaurants, galleries, and artists lofts – and ultimately to a hub of global corporate offices – began with a series of restaurants and loft conversions in the mid-1990s.  The glass out of which this work is crafter is from the first such restaurant – Marche.  The materiel on the glass is gathered from the surrounding neighborhood.
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015_09_670-675
015_09_670-675
For several years I ran a small office with a few other people devoted to exploring ways of attracting reinvestment in the West Side of Chicago.  This effort involved developing what we called an “urban operating system” as well as kit of parts to rehabilitate the aging housing stock.  This set of documents summarized our approach to redevelopment and how it might be scaled beyond Chicago.
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015_01_578-669
015_01_578-669
For several years I ran a small office with a few other people devoted to exploring ways of attracting reinvestment in the West Side of Chicago.  This effort involved developing what we called an “urban operating system” as well as kit of parts to rehabilitate the aging housing stock.  This set of photographs, in particular, was used as site research for the proposals we developed to attract interest from investors.
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014_09_577
014_09_577
A particular investigation of a place, history, or community often leads to artwork in a variety of media.  In this case, photographs, sculptures, and this book.  The format of a book was chosen to contain the narrative that grew out of my experience walking along the road and scrutinizing the photographs that resulted.  The narrative ultimately is a utopia that images a new relationship to our built environment.
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014_04_574-576
014_04_574-576
The area surrounding Western Avenue includes a number of vacant lots that are the result of a broad transformation of the area between the 1940s and the present.  Crucial in this transformation was the 1968 Riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during which hundreds of buildings were set ablaze and later demolished.  Objects found in these lots were combined to create a frame for the photographs of Western Ave.
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014_01_437-573
014_01_437-573
Long roads running parallel create cross-sections of neighborhoods and communities, ways of building and decorating the landscape.  Walking from one end to the other provides and opportunity to look at the people who are there and the materiality of the world they inhabit.  It shows difference and continuity – a long history and idealized future – that can help us understand what is going on in the world.
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013_01_394-436
013_01_394-436
What’s not there is often the most significant – the body that was there and that might come in the future, what one was thinking about and trying to do and the distraction that caused the turn of attention, and all the destinations pulling us through life.  This work looks at the traces if this passing through the world – not, however, via the successes, but through the mistakes and signs of use.
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012_01_363-393
012_01_363-393
As cities develop, there are often sites that are leftover from particular projects, buildings, and infrastructure.  Perhaps they are made less desirable by these new investments.  Perhaps they are difficult to build on because of what takes place below or above.  Nevertheless, they often hold great beauty and potential for new encounters, programs, and events that might enrich the life of the city.  This set of photographs looks at one such site above what is known as Hubbard Cave in Chicago.
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011_01_341-362
011_01_341-362
The fortunate circumstances of some people as opposed to others call attention to the structure of wealth and the chance of our existence.  So much of this chance is characterized by investment of energy by previous generations to transform their material circumstances.  So often, this has required intense confrontation with the land – for many resulting is little wealth at all.  This work explores that contrast.
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010_01_289-340
010_01_289-340
Beyond a tradition of illustrating grand narratives, artwork should render the invisible, fleeting, overlooking, underappreciated, and undervalued so that we might have time and space for consideration and a new basis of knowledge.  This work is concerned with sites around the city of Chicago that once produced the goods defining our world - in this case, the Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works that made a century of telephones among countless other objects.
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009_01_214-288
009_01_214-288
Some places and things linger in one state for a prolonged period of time – perhaps decaying, in other case being meticulously cared for.  At some point, however, a more profound change might occur that radically transforms the materiality or negates it entirely.  These photographs explore both infrastructure that has been in place for decades and will likely endure as well as buildings about to experience a rebirth.
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008_09_213
008_09_213
Artifacts that are personally relevant are quite distinct from those that are relevant to a wider range of people.  Some objects, however, may hold extreme significance to an individual while also evoking a broader class of objects to which a number of people are attached.  This work explores this tension between personal and universal through the practice of collage – both physical and with the aid of a camera.
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008_04_199-212
008_04_199-212
Artifacts that are personally relevant are quite distinct from those that are relevant to a wider range of people.  Some objects, however, may hold extreme significance to an individual while also evoking a broader class of objects to which a number of people are attached.  This work explores this tension between personal and universal through the practice of collage – both physical and with the aid of a camera.
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008_02_167-198
008_02_167-198
Artifacts that are personally relevant are quite distinct from those that are relevant to a wider range of people.  Some objects, however, may hold extreme significance to an individual while also evoking a broader class of objects to which a number of people are attached.  This work explores this tension between personal and universal through the practice of collage – both physical and with the aid of a camera.
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007_02_158-166
007_02_158-166
Archives, slides containing specimens for examination, traces of past events, packaging, letters, envelopes, and sealing wax to ensure security are the dominant material of this work.  They are combined on panels that once held an earlier painting, but that has since been erased.  Together they form a composition that explores transparency, intimacy, and traces of life.
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006_02_153-157
006_02_153-157
The process of creating 006_02_096-152 involved a variety of experiments – most of which did not become more formal works.  These painted photographs, however, represent an important early use of painted geometry to highlight, form dialogue with, and reframe the content of a photograph.  This process is evident in a significant amount of later work.
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006_02_096-152
006_02_096-152
This work dwells in an empty building on the eve of its transformation from its initial use to a program suited to the evolving nature of the heart of the American City.  Through examining and recording traces of the past, a field of reference is created that sparks the imagination.  The mind connects these elements to the world beyond the walls.  A new geography is formed.
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005_09_095
005_09_095
The moving image works 005_05_082-094 led to a series of exemplary stills that were indicative of the major themes explored.  This limited edition book is intended to highlight the juxtapositions that occur within the moving images works while giving the receiver time to reflect on them with added time and enhanced capacity to explore the totality of the set.
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005_05_082-094
005_05_082-094
The era of global mobility has made it possible to connect disparate locales with increasing ease.  The global north is compressed into an increasingly homogenous zone of wealthy consumers while the south house cheap labor in factories.  This relationship was inaugurated in the colonial era as chattel slavery returned.  The Caribbean Islands and North American Cities played a significant role.  This work explores that history and its legacy today.
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004_02_061-081
004_02_061-081
People pass through places like Union Station in Chicago and other cities around the world every day without pausing to look at the truly remarkable building, seeing each other and all the artifacts making the moment.  Through photography and geometry framing, hiding, and combing, time is arrested and an encounter held for examination.
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003_02_050-060
003_02_050-060
The consequences of enslavement are inscribed in the landscape.  Land is controlled and people are brought under the influence of charismatic leaders.  The lines that I draw can, however, protest past decisions leading to atrocities and give birth to a new territory.
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002_08_042-049
002_08_042-049
The time spent researching the context in which each treaty signing occurred – the broader effect this event had on the world, the symbolic and real nature, the other events occurring the make it relevant – is distilled in text that opens that vast space at which this work stands at the edge.
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002_04_034-041
002_04_034-041
Salvaged wood lath covered in plaster become an object that evokes a particular history of construction.  Taken outside of its context and idealized, it assumes emptiness that is contrasted with the depth of the images used to create collages next to which they are intended to be viewed.
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002_02_026-033
002_02_026-033
The line between past and future, one side and the other, two opponents, perhaps future allies, provide the context for this work.  The rooms in which these meetings occur, the focus.
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001_02_001-025
001_02_001-025
Those who inhabit this moment make the future via the present materials.  This formation will be guided by negotiating the difference between what we think of as the world and how we see the horizon before us as an individual.
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Writing

Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_026
Unf*cking Capitalism
Unf*cking Capitalism explores the origin and evolution of our increasingly digitally powered world that exists at the intersection of the virtual and physical as well as how this evolution relates to the future of late capitalism. The book argues that this future will be driven by the capacity of the virtual/physical to cultivate the value of the utility that these virtual/physical connections can provide rather than the value of a thing measured via the price that it yields.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_024
Tokenizing Towards Sustainability
Throughout history, humans have worked together to create habitats that support collective life. They have managed resources, defended borders, defined norms, created systems to govern life, and developed civilizations that are capable of lasting for centuries or even millenia. Throughout, technology has played a significant role in allowing towns, villages, cities, and countries to manage resources and support a constantly growing population. Failure to effectively manage these resources and to deliver the requisite energy to feed and power a civilization has often led to the collapse of these civilizations.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_023
Business Strategy in the Era of the Internet of Value
Whether a business is centuries old or just releasing their first product, the current environment presents a range of challenges. Consumers are increasingly skeptical of the sincerity of legacy brands as well as some of the leading digital service providers. Some might even go so far as to say that an erosion of trust has occurred. At the same time, businesses continue to be enamored by the capacity of digital environments, objects, experiences, and marketplaces to captivate these disaffected – and particularly younger – consumers in order to generate strong returns on investment, while also potentially supporting enhanced sustainability. 
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_022
Tokenization, Blockchain, and Industry 4.0 (TBI) as Medium for Art
Tokenization, blockchain, and Industry 4.0 (TBI) can support complex artworks that are not easily confined to a single medium, that are durational, that are defined through relationships, and that engage the receiver of the artwork as a critical component that, in some cases, may even contribute to the form that the artwork takes on. TBI, in this sense, is the medium from which the meta / physical art object is made.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_021
A Non-Fungible Token as a Medium of Communication
This essay explores how NFTs can be designed in such a way so as to record and convey the content of an event to diverse groups across space and time. The essay explore how such an architecture might draw on the technic of cinema, the content of such an event, the relationship between NFTs and perception, and how value might be anchored in the importance of the subject and its / their biography and contribution to innovation and broader progress. The essay concludes by considering how the NFT as index relating diverse media across space and time might be used as a tool to fight entropy. Finally, the essay explores how creative individuals might be commissioned to explore the future architecture of such NFTs.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_020
The Power of Hybrid Digital-Physical Objects as Supported by NFTs and Blockchain
Digital objects are only of value if they are able to affect our habits and habitat. On one hand, this could take the form of a game that one plays that causes one to configure a room in a particular manner. It could take the form of engagement with a social media platform that causes one to dress in a particular manner, attend specific events, and socialize with a select set of friends. On the other hand, such digital objects could lead to more profound affects on the physical world. They could take the form of a ransomware attack that shuts down a pipeline, a social media campaign that results in electing a person to serve in government, or the use of a natural resource such as water, wind, or solar power to maintain digital infrastructure. In what follows, the definition of physical and digital object will be explored, the objects that currently dominate our world will be briefly highlighted, and how new hybrid physical-digital objects with an enhanced capacity to affect change in the world might be created.
The purpose of this exploration is ultimately to set up a framework by which digital objects can become more actively aligned with physical objects so that each can take advantage of their respective capacities. Doing so would be to expand upon the trend that connects things to the internet in order to enhance their interoperability, capacity to maintain the physical world, and ability to serve users through machine learning and artificial intelligence. In these cases, it is generally the case that the physical comes to serve the digital. In what follows, a more balanced and reciprocal relationship will be explored. This investigation will ideally help us uncover how a platform that bridges the digital and physical might come into existence in order to actively construct a new type of relationship that will ultimately restore some of the value to physical space that digital objects may have diminished through online retail, virtual work, and time devoted to digital networking activities that have little positive impact on the physical world. In the process, this new relationship will ideally be one that supports enhanced sustainability and equity of the built environment.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_019
Reframing American Culture: Towards a User-Owned Network and Exchange
Through examining where American Culture, broadly speaking, is produced and consumed as well as how it has been captured by narratives to enhance power structures that drive polarization, this book argues for the merits of a user-owned cultural network and how it might be created. Developing such a network at the intersection of the digital and physical would take attention away from digital platforms that drive polarization and create a route by which users of digital networks profit directly from owning those networks rather than being exploited by those networks. It would support a new space for cultural work for those who have more free time due to automation while also creating a more robust exchange between various types of cultural producers and consumers directly around cultural elements rather than around polarizing topics. The result will lead to a space, conversation, and set of cultural objects and experiences that are more focused on the physical, human, and spiritual challenges facing the country rather than on dwelling in digital spaces that have increasingly become echo chambers.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_025
FGP Atelier: Progression
This illustrated volume provides insight into the work of the internationally renowned architectural firm FGP ATELIER, famous for its spectacular high-rises in Asia and the construction of the biggest baseball stadium in Mexico City. Accompanying the many photographs are essays that elucidate the basic conceptual principles behind the firm’s architectural work.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_018
Towards a New Economy of Art
There has been a great deal of speculation about how the Covid-19 Pandemic will affect art and the art world. This question is, of course, somewhat insignificant as communities around the world continue to face a dire health crisis that leaves more people dead each day. Many businesses remain closed to help fight the spread of the disease while consumer behavior has been fundamentally altered in ways that may have long-lasting effects that will take years for businesses to adjust to. As a result, the economy remains deeply depressed, unemployment remains high, and many people struggle to meet financial obligations.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_017
The Architecture of Hospitality
Hotels play a significant role in global real estate.  While occupying significantly less space than offices and somewhat less space than retail, hotels have continued to grow and new hotels have been built as global travel for business and pleasure continues to increase.  As this has occurred, hotels have had to renovate and build to suit the specific demands of different traveler types that have changed significantly over the last couple of decades.  While hotel rooms must still fulfill the same basic functions as they have for the last hundred years, they have followed trends in apartment buildings that have seen rooms shrink and demands for amenities grow.  New hotels tend to have more space for socializing.  The lobby, once a transient zone reserved for checking in and out, has become a place to hang out, work, and take a meeting.  A wider range of restaurants and bars are being offered and amenities such as game rooms, libraries, and fitness centers are becoming increasingly common.  At the same time, rooms are becoming more interesting and highly designed as hoteliers compete to attract an increasingly style-conscious generation of business and leisure travelers.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_016
FGP Atelier: Especies
This book presents the architectural work of FGP Atelier Founder Francisco Gonzalez Pulido from the years leading up to the founding of FGP Atelier. I was involved editing the book and conducting the interview with Gonzalez Pulido that opens the book. I was also collaborated with FGP Atelier COO, Gergana Gonzalez Pulido, on the graphic design of the book.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_015
The Architecture of Fashion
Architecture and fashion – specifically, the fashion of how people are clad – have a long and complex relationship.  Each has influenced the other in a variety of manners ranging from the way in which a space serves as a stage on which new fashions can appear to how fashion is influenced by a design philosophy embodied in an architectural style.  The colors, patterns, forms, degrees of elaboration of clothing have influenced wall covering, drapery, and the overall style of rooms.  The habit of hosting large dinners and balls, parties and salons, has shaped the form that historic domiciles have taken.  The broader lifestyle of bedrooms, dressing rooms, morning rooms, game rooms, drawing rooms, receiving halls, kitchens, and servants’ rooms could all said to be closely linked to what is considered fashionable and the broader habits of a given society.  
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_014
Revisiting Sites and Non-Sites
The notion of a “site” has become something architects fixate upon.  We yearn for a potential client to identify a site in order to begin developing intriguing concepts to help win the job.  We analyze the ecology, orientation, mobility infrastructure, utilities, history, cultural traditions, habits, and broader urban context in which the site exists.  In doing so, we think about the program, allowable building density, building traditions, and overall goals of the client.  In some cases, we may consider the buildings that still exist on the site or that have existed on the site in the past.  Generally, the site that we are given is in a desirable location.  It is a place that a group has determined is of value.  This value is often directly tied to the program that the client hopes to bring to the site.  Further, this value is tied to the inhabitants who will animate the program when the building is complete.  The location must conform to their expectations, desires, need for security, proximity to other activities, and broader cultural tradition defining how they interact with each other and the city.  If these conditions can be fulfilled by a particular location, then it is determined that the site can support the often considerable investment required to create a new structure.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_013
Building for Retail: From Discrete Stores to a Retail Landscape
This essay is not going to be about how to take comprehensive steps to help retail establishments address an impending crisis that not only threatens a range of brands and real estate concerns with bankruptcy, but the viability of the entire economy.  Retail Therapy by Mark Pilkington provides a powerful exploration of such concerns and is an advisable resource for anyone who is interested in addressing the underlying challenges facing retail.  This essay will instead look at how the crisis facing retail is playing out urbanistically, in terms of design, and spatially.  This will involve exploring the historic position within the city, the power that product, display, and store design has had to drive interest from consumers, and the recent trends leading up to the current crisis.  With this understanding in hand, we will then be able to begin to ask how design and city planning can contribute to a broader revitalization of retail.  This will allow us to go beyond asking how retail can be revitalized to asking how we can deal with the tremendous vacancies and threat to real estate value that a shift to online sales implies.  In the end, we hope to offer a set of scenarios for how traditional retail space on main streets and in malls might be used that extends from historic habits, while also being grounded in future trends of how we live and consume as well as our broader desire and goals for ourselves, local community, country, and world.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_012
The Space of Art: Spatial Challenges Facing Production, Presentation, and Storage
Architects have been consistently intrigued by the possibility of designing spaces to house artwork.  This is in large part because of the coevolution of art and architecture and, in particular, the overlap between the two fields during the Renaissance.  The invention of perspective drawing propelled innovation by artists and architects.  As this occurred, new architectural typologies were solidified – the urban palazzo and rural villa – that created new space for artworks to be created.  In particular, the vast white plaster walls of these structures created an opportunity for frescos while the halls and large rooms created space for new and ancient sculptures to be displayed.  As industries and trade evolved, oil paint and linen canvas began to present a viable options for the creation of pictures.  The result was a new capacity to move artworks from one location to another. In realizing this liberation of the fresco from the wall and coupled with the growing interest in the ancient world in collecting in general, the broader question of where to display and store artwork came to the fore.  Collectors created curiosity cabinets for small treasures, halls devoted to hanging artworks, and private galleries.  The latter evolved amidst royal patronage in countries throughout Europe.  These galleries were ultimately made public after the abolition or reorganization of the monarchy and its role in governing and society more broadly.  As this occurred, a wide range of royal and other elite individuals continued to collect artwork at an increasing rate.  This led to the establishment of a range of schools that evolved from the ateliers of artists and that were dedicated to cultivating artistic talent.  It also led to a more formalized market for art that now included galleries and art dealers as an intermediary between artist and collector.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_011
A Dream for the Future of Kedzie Ave. and the West Side of Chicago More Broadly
Like almost every aspect of the United States economy – from education to health care to prisons and all forms of communication and even social interaction – the investment in new infrastructure, neighborhoods, and real estate more broadly has become increasingly driven by demands for ever higher profits.  While real estate developers have always been driven by making money on the space they create, there was a time during the last hundred years when the government invested more heavily in new infrastructure (such as the Interstate Highway System and many urban transportation systems that were built as well as the countless bridges, tunnels, and dams) and when more investment was being made in affordable and public housing through building new units and rent control.  This period was one of tremendous growth of suburbs throughout the country coupled with unprecedented economic prosperity and considerable population growth.  The era allowed many who grew up in crowded inner city conditions to find an escape in new spatious light filled homes with lawns and attached garages.  At the same time, the migration to the suburbs caused many neighborhoods in cities across the country to decline.  The process was further precipitated by racial politics that encouraged segregation and white residents to flee.  
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_010
Infrastructure and (In)Equality
Too often, the work that takes place to build and re-build our cities occurs in isolated parcels of varying scales driven by the ambitions of real estate developers to create new space through investment in order to ultimately make a profit.  Spending directly by city governments mostly takes the form of infrastructure maintenance or tax incentives to developers to build projects.  Rarely does a cohesive vision for city or regional planning emerge.  The result is often the perception of urban development driven by speculation leading to higher rents, taxes, and gentrification that can force existing residents out.  At the same time, it is important to realize that through new developments, the tax base can increase, developers can support the construction of new infrastructure, and can help active previously dormant sections of the city, bridge disconnected parts, and ignite new vibrant urban life. The conversation is particularly charged in the context of projects that have received national attention and considerable criticism such as Hudson Yards as well as a national affordable housing crisis that is making it difficult for many people to live near their jobs or in neighborhoods their families have called home for many decades.  Hudson Yards in particular has been criticized for creating a series of uninspired buildings surrounding an ultra-luxurious shopping mall.  Even The Vessel that could have been seen as a positive contribution to the cultural landscape of New York has been met with skepticism as a result of its extreme cost, void like form, and lack of a clearly positive impact in a city beset by extreme and increasing inequality.  The one exception to this criticism is The Shed that many view as a much needed space that fills rather than creates a void in the cultural landscape.  
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_009
A Housing Platform: Thinking Beyond the Division Between Affordable and Market Rate Housing
The general inability to offer broad strategies for solving the growing crisis of affordable housing in America is related to a propensity to look at one aspect of the problem rather than exploring the interconnected web of past and present variables that go into defining the complexities of the problem of creating and offering housing at a cost that is aligned with income, jobs, location, and generally what people can afford to pay for a dwelling unit as related to other costs of living.  We too often accept the parameters of the object that we want to create and the place in which we want to create it without fully understanding the multitude of forces that go into making that figure and the ground on which it sits.  The history and lessons of how housing has been subsidized via government backed mortgages, concentration of low-income families in high-rise buildings, and programs that offer tax incentives to developers are often overlooked in the context of specific new housing plans that seek to address a small portion of the demand and offer a specific return for a particular constituency. At the same time, the entangled history of housing and racial discrimination, zoning laws guiding development and neighborhoods that develop a particular character and type of resident, systems of value that drive what we want out of a housing unit, and the way in which we build community and transform our world through technics and work are often considered outside of the immediate task of developing a design that can be built at a low cost.  We should seek to fully analyze how the cost of other goods and services impacts what one can afford to pay for housing.  The cost and benefits of transportation, digital, and social networks should be considered.  We should also consider integrating new housing into employment channels.  Most importantly, we should think beyond the division between affordable and market rate housing in order to arrive at a situation where all housing is affordable and it is seen as a right not a privilege.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_008
Pervasive Media & Restoration of Mediation
Digital screens have become a pervasive presence in our lives.  We carry them in our pockets, are guided through cities by those installed to help us navigate transportation services, and often begin and end our day receiving news and entertainment.   During the work day, they have become one of the primary points of engagement.  This is true not only in professional and service oriented occupations, but manufacturing, logistics, construction, and maintenance.  In the context of those engaged in the design, construction, and maintenance of the built environment, the screen has become the primary surface via which design occurs, contractors are increasingly constructing buildings with a paperless job-site, augmented reality on mobile tablets is being used to validate accuracy of construction, and tablets have become pervasive in operating and maintaining buildings once they are complete.  At the same time, screens are integrated into the finished product to support the end users.  On one hand, there are no significant challenges for the designer to address as this occurs.  Architects have no trouble integrating screens, building management systems, and new generations of IoT products.  Product designers have thrived in the context of a consumer culture that has enhanced the demand for their work.  BIM, 5D design and planning, and other digital technologies have been embraced by many of the most cutting edge architects as tools that can help them to streamline the design process and deliver more accurate drawings and finished building products that ultimately save their clients time and money.  In doing so, these designers see an easy symbiotic relationship between their work and the growing range of apps and technologies serving the built environment, energy, water, waste, and mobility sectors.  They see little conflict in venture-backed tech companies creating products that will deeply influence the urban form, how we live, and how we relate to our built environment.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_007
Language and Architecture: Locating the Event
A number of trends exist in architectural practice.  These range from the continuing process of globalization, the media attention placed on architects that encourages differentiation, and the continued dominance of the icons that result in the need to grapple with the productization of space, prefabrication, and affordability.  In discussing these concerns, architects, critics, and theorists often speak directly to the current problem and the way that the primary parties frame it.  They rarely look at the broader theoretical foundation on which the architect may have built their practice and how that theoretical foundation is playing out in the present work.  In the process, criticism and interpretation run the risk of remaining confined to a particular realm of the world, how we inhabit it, way of talking about building, and capacity to get something out of the space in which we live.  In this sense, conversations often reference a small subset of discourse without considering the expanded field that determines the conditions of that subset.  This conversation fails to take into account the series of translations that take place between different levels and spheres of discourse, material flows, political authorities, subjectivities, temporal structures, purposes, ends, and frameworks of judgement that together have profound consequences on how we conceptualize space, inhabit it, and encounter something called architecture along the way.
The consequence of this omission is that we often find ourselves confronted with an investment that has been made in something that the owners and builders consider to be architecture, but that those who will ultimately inhabit it do not like.  This is essentially a situation where a particular collection of subjects do not want to live their lives within the sway of a particular architect author.  While one could say that they should just escape to another locale, doing so runs the risk of negating a particular investment as well as opens the possibility of a broader disjunction that could exclude a vast range of people from a capacity to influence how the space they inhabit is designed.  Further, by cutting off people from determining what is architecture, it opens the possibility that the work of architects becomes increasingly focused on problems that are internal to architecture and divorced from the problems of people.  If the works of architecture are intended to serve some higher purpose and function in an elevated manner for the inhabitants, it also cuts people off from such contact and how that contact can function for us all.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_006
Mediated Urbanism
The purpose of this essay is to explore a series of strategies for urban redevelopment under the term “Mediated Urbanism.”  The audience is both specific and broad.  In a narrow sense, the audience is those who are concerned with the future of the American City and who are committed to taking concrete steps towards its improvement.  These people are both those with the training to do so as well as those who control sufficient capital to directly invest in the work required to transform the city and create enhanced ecological sustainability, new initiatives driving economic growth, and a strong local culture organized around art, common space, and shared interest in maintaining a productive city.  Those who want to invest in the future of the city and those with the capital to do so, however, are dispersed across a wide range of disciplines and geographies.  Very often, the boundaries that result lead to obstacles to collaboration.  As a result, new approaches that, in particular, require collaboration across boundaries often have a limited chance of occurring.  Mediated Urbanism is a means of addressing this broad group and pulling them together around a shared ambition through the straightforward notion of collaborating on using “media” to transform the urban environment.  
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_005
Art In / With the World
It is vital to understand what the term “art” refers to in the world and for the people who produce and consume it.  This notion holds for many such terms that divide the horizon of our existence into different categories for which we have varying degrees of interest and concern.  It is particularly true for “art” because of the legacy of works that continue to draw interest, the joy that it results in, and the extent to which “art” stands out from the rest of the world.  Engaging in such a pursuit allows us to understand the physical material configurations that are associated with art, the relationship between those configurations and the broader world, and the network of judgment that arises in close proximity to evaluate, profit from, and take joy in the events that are unfolding around something called “art.”  It opens the possibility of tracking how this process has occurred at different points in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the term and how it is situated. In what follows, I will explore how the term “art” is situated, performs, and affects rather than what it means.  This is a result of little interest in challenging the sprawling set of experiences and objects, art histories and aesthetic systems that have arisen through attempts to do so.  I take the diffuse field of art production and consumption coupled with the myriad opinions and stances towards it as a given that summarizes the immense and varied capacity to create heightened experiences filled with information as a field of potential for future innovation, action, and progression.  This field cannot be said to have a sensible meaning when taken in its entirety.  It is defined by overlapping and conflicting energy and materiality.  These dynamic relationships trace how “art” is situated in the world and for the receiver through local instances where art is given meaning.  It is these specific moments of situatedness that I am interested in exploring at both the material level and the descriptive level of discourse.  Doing so will allow us to understand not only how art is situated in an everyday encounter, but how art is situated at the level of language.  It is such language that creates a prejudice or frame that limits how – and with what level of accuracy – we describe phenomena and ultimately what new actions and capacities result.

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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_004
Resituating Art, Architecture, and Design with Levels and Spheres
This essay investigates how art, architecture, and design might be situated in the world in order to restore a functional and communal relationship – and by extension economy – to art, architecture, and design.  In order to do so, I begin by characterizing an impediment to such situatedness of art, architecture, and design as resulting from an increasingly divided world.  This divided world is characterized by new modes of representation, varieties of actors, and entities being representation.  From this follows a discussion of how “representation” is defined as well as the benefits and hazards of relying on a single system versus multiple systems of representation caste by different spheres of influence.  In characterizing representation, I discuss the exchange between presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production, base and superstructure as defining different levels of experience.  I suggest that art, architecture, and design no longer occupy a fixed level or relation to these terms, but offer a range of levels that different groups of people can relate to and use to define themselves by.  This process of identification is an alternative to identification based on class.  In occupying multiple levels, art, architecture, and design are created through a process of elevation that allows them to make contact with and ultimately define how each manifestation will operate on different levels.  I discuss how elevation to a higher level occurs for each by un-packing how presentation and re-presentation, production and re-production operate.  Although the potential exists to address multiple levels with the same work, it is often the case that works of art, architecture, and design are oriented based on economically and socially defined class structures.  In this sense, the potential for these works to support direct identification is limited to begin with by class structures that limit information and access in order to make the work appear to not support such a potential.  This tendency is broken when men and women create new value and enter the intimate world of art as artists, critics, or new collectors – transcending the class and space from which they came as a result.  The highest end work is often hidden within the studio, gallery, or private enclosure.  In this context, I call for this high-end work to be resituated in the city and in direct confrontation with other work derived from other spheres of influence.  Different spheres would come into contact with each other.  The co-presence of spheres would challenge rigid hierarchies of culture and offer room to find comfort with different levels of culture as embodied in art, architecture, and design.  As a result, the relationship between levels of relation to representation and presentation, production and reproduction becomes more important than how any one level appears. The possibility of operating simultaneously in different spheres – adding or subtracting from one or another in the process – opens the possibility of a complex accounting procedure and exchange system.  In so doing, the makers of art, architecture, and design might work together in order to create a communal space and framework of value that currently does not exist.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_003
The Dis-Enclosure of Art
The Dis-Enclosure of Art investigates the moment when an object is encountered by a person and how and why this person might consider what they encounter to be “art.”  This question is asked within the context of an attempt to interrogate the advantages and disadvantages of the spatial and disciplinary boundaries that enclose art.  The purpose of this work is not only to understand why some things are considered art while others are not, but to understand how this encounter with art has evolved over history.  Moreover, it is to build on this understanding of the historical variations in how the concept of art as well as the art object equates with the world and is constructed through chains of interactions and relations in order to see how the various components affect the world, art, and society in different manners.  Over the course of Dis-Enclosure, I offer an understanding of how art is differentiated and creates difference – often with a profound affect on how people live.  In doing so, we might understand a broader trend of how art operates and how people operate art towards one end or another.  The purpose of understanding an evolutionary trend of art is not so much to provide grounds on which predictions for the future or criticism of the current field of production might rest.  Instead, this search is undertaken in order to attain a better sense of how different modes and periods of art making are related to each other.  Through comparing motivations and strategies for dealing with the situation in which an artist and art operates, it is possible to discover a deeper level of meaning.  By uncovering a frame for such activities of the artist, art, and historical method of understanding it that stretch beyond any period, it is possible to make sense of actions and entities that appear to lack meaning or context.  Through using a frame capable of framing both the world and art, it is possible to understand how art relates to the world in a similar manner over time, across space, and between discourses.  Such a frame would be a balanced equation describing the economy of art on both quantitative and qualitative terms.  The concept of “dis-enclosure” as developed by Jean-Luc Nancy is a closely related frame.  The Dis-Enclosure of Art extends Nancy’s work beyond the realm of Christianity and into the realm of art.  It traces how the forces that led to and resulted from what Nancy calls “the dis-enclosure of Christianity” affect art.  It looks at moments when the forces of art affect the dis-enclosure of Christianity.  The consequence is to understand a trend of dis-enclosure in the realm of art and how this occurrence affects art, its creator, and the world at large.  By understanding this relationship, those related to art might be better equipped to offer freedom and liberation from suffering.  I investigate these concerns in the following sections: I. Introduction, II. The Equation and the World, III. Art off the Wall, IV. Introduction to the Critique of the Wall, V. Critique of the Wall, VI. Quantity and the Wall, VII. Drawing the Line, VIII. Crisis of Sense and Its Reason, IX. Dis-Enclosure, X. Bearing on Capital, XI. Bearing on Art, XII. Bearing and the Event, XIII. Introduction to Sense, Sensors, and Sensation, XIV. Sensors, Sense, and Sensation, XV. Adding the Subject, XVI. Subtracting the Subject, XVII. Virtual and Real as a Negotiation of Production and Reproduction, XVIII. Aesthetics and Politics Integrated via Presentation and Re-Presentation of the Image, XIX. Dis-Enclosure Reconsidered, XX. From the Work of Art to the Art of Work, XXI. Equations In-Between, XXII. Passing Exception, XXIII. Coordinating Organizations, XXIV. Rendering, and XXV. Organizing Codes.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_002
Modalities of Work
“Modalities of Work” is the most overtly philosophical text that I have written.  Although drawing heavily on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, this work exists entirely without quotation.  It is concerned with ideas as such and the definitions that are required.  The primary goal of this essay is to locate art through experience.  I begin this investigation by looking at how art occurs in different media situated throughout the city and, in particular, through how “art” is situated in museums.  This is followed by an historical discussion of the evolution of the museum in New York.  I investigate how a hierarchy is created through how the museum sits spatially.  This hierarchy is extended to the interior of the museum.  In order to “understand” this hierarchy and the works that are organized, I investigate different systems of thought and use them to see each work in a museum. Art “works” through this system by provoking judgment that results in language through discourse.  Work is understood as media in advertisements and catalogues and as a number indicating a price or value.  This value can be seen in the connection of the entity to an economy, allowing it to play a role in a broader realm through its exceptional status and giving it a role in rites and rituals.  In this sense, I move from locating art to asking what system governs its location.  The image that allows for the work of art to be exchanged within a broader economy is made of various parameters.  These parameters – duration of time spent with the canvas, availability of certain materials, cost of rent for a studio, relationship to other artists, interaction with collectors, dexterity of the artist’s body, afflictions that the artist lives with, etc… – extend independently as forces in the world.  It is possible to see past a definition of art that requires it to become whole before it can be evaluated via the theological, teleological, tautological, or ontological and to works of art defined by the relation of forces.  The relationship between these forces is ultimately structured by a process of information that defines the rendering and resolution of these forces.
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Walker Thisted Writing
000_10_001
40 Meters High: Miro at the Pompidou
This essay is concerned with the relationship between the medium in which art occurs and the content of the work.  In addition, 40 Meters High examines the relationship between the work and the context in which it is presented.  I begin by considering the work of an artist making what appears to be paintings while actively stating that he works beyond paint through a series of moments and tactics that support the painters argument.  From these examples, I arrive at a worldview defined by dreams, liberation, and freedom.  The location and presence of Miro’s signature within the field of the canvas traces changing forms and figures with which he might have identified and enhances a territorial, cartographic, and subjectively inhabited understanding of the surface of his work.  This worldview and the possibility that paintings might be read as maps of a city or world becomes the departure point for asking how the museums functions both in the context of the works presented, more broadly as an apparatus for viewing art, and as a site within the city.  I consider these questions both directly in terms of Miro and the Pompidou and more generally.  Through this analysis, I discuss how context affects judgment.  Ultimately, I characterize the role of the museum in the contemporary city – agreeing with Lewis Mumford’s claim that the city has become a museum.  Through a careful unpacking of the distinction between home and museum through an analysis of the evolution of museum out of the palace, I suggest that the museum is one specific type of exhibit among many that teaches us specific things about how we might live and relate to each other.
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