2025 — Bell Rock Labyrinth and Disintegration
2025 — A Manufacturing Process for Moiré Silk
2025 — Dogification
2025 — Coop
2024 — Yule Log to Cure the Anxiety
2024 — Companion Piece
2023 — Christiania Sound Archive
2022 — Place of Toil
2022 — Animal Noise (Institute for Critical Animal Studies)
2021 — Unsound Transmissions (Society for Disability Studies)
2021 — aden: tizita, from the feet up
Yule Log to Cure the Anxiety, 2025
HD video (color, sound), livestream, and fire crackler sound machine, 6:22 minutes looped
Yule Log to Cure the Anxiety considers the proliferation of ambience media, tracing its lineage to WPIX-TV’s 1966 “Yule Log” (a televised loop of a fireplace at Gracie Mansion, home to New York City’s Mayor).
After Carolyn Lazard’s Untitled (Yule Log) (2020), which references the same broadcast history, this work shifts focus to the now-pervasive online ecosystem of therapeutic immersive media, turning particular attention to ambience videos—digital simulations that merge scenery and soundscapes to soothe, distract, focus, and regulate. The video repurposes footage and audio from a campfire gathering to deconstruct the mechanisms of these digital tools. Here, ambience videos and similar online simulations are read as “affective machines”—systems designed to administer emotional regulation and engineer an emotional experience, severed from its material and social bases. Effectively functioning as emotional management systems, by their logic, comfort, safety, intimacy, and sociality become replicable affective states, re-organizing material presence into consumable artifice.
Alongside a readymade fire crackler sound machine—a consumer device used to simulate the sounds of a burning fire for use with electric fireplaces—the work conflates lived experience and its reproduction. In this constructed atmosphere, affect is at once invoked and estranged, ambiently present yet always at a remove. The true sounds of a crackling fire are an afterthought.