Phillip David Stearns

Plastiglomerates are a recently discovered techno-fossil marking a new horizon of the Anthropocene, the Plasticene, in Earth's geologic record. They’re plastic rocks; naturally occurring agglomerations of volcanic solids, rocks, gravel, sand, shells, and plastic. Anything that can be fused together with wildfire, campfire or lava heated plastic debris has the potential to become a plastiglomerate.

The artificial plastiglomerates displayed here as Plasticene Artifacts were intentionally produced using plastic garbage sourced from the artists waste stream, warmed gently in a panini press. During the formation of each artifact, the artist cataloged and photographed each plastic piece that was melted and added to it.

2024

15” diameter x 56” tall

Materials: Custom software, microcontroller, electronics, tubular bells, teak rounds, rope, hardware

Wind chimes… but the wind is WiFi signals.

After a survey of the local WiFi radio space, 12 of 256 different kinds of WiFi packets are mapped to tubular bells. The tuning system for v1 uses 2 and a half octaves of a C9 chord.

2023

A presentation of selected video works created at Signal Culture in 2019 reflecting on historic and current events at the time. Imagery and video content was sourced online and remixed using vintage analog video equipment.

Works from left to right:

WTC Waves

Liberty Clouds

Three Letter Leaks

Fish Tank

Congressional Cascade

Hurricane on Capitol Hill

Materials: multi-channel video & audio, custom media players, CRT and LCD TVs, filing cabinets, LEDs

Special Thanks:

Signal Culture

PlatteForum

Jenna Maurice

Adán De La Garza

Marsha Robinson

Created for Denver Month of Video 2023

2023

One part underground cyberpunk arms market, one part textile bazaar. This installation materializes weaponry from the Russo-Ukrainian war (2022-present) by translating malware samples published by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine into woven textile designs which are then used to fashion 1/2 scale plush replicas of Soviet general purpose FAB-250 air-to-surface bombs.

Open Vault is a speculative cyber arms vendor, a multi-modal performance of corporate identity, whose mission is to make cyber warfare and cyber weapons accessible to the wider public.

Materials:

Malware samples, custom software, custom jacquard woven fabric, single board computers, projectors, LEDs, miscellaneous hardware.

Acknowledgements:

Created for the 2023 NO VACANCY artist residency, a project of RiNo Arts District in Denver, CO. Printed poster courtesy Signs By Tomorrow. Weavings produced by Pure Country Weavers.

https://open-vault-on-canal.eventbrite.com

https://open-vault.com

(2017-ongoing)

We live in an age of intensifying cyber conflict which is taking the form of a generalized cyber war. Cyber attacks involve a diverse ecology of individuals, criminal groups, international organizations and companies, nation-states and governments all operating with their own agendas. High profile attacks have been carried out against power grids, nuclear enrichment facilities, and presidential campaigns. More generalized ransomware attacks (WannaCry) have taken advantage of vulnerabilities weaponized by the NSA.

With cyber warfare comes the development of offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, and along with it a cyber arms market. In addition to the programs run by governments and nation-states, several hundred companies globally peddle cyber “security” tools and services, which can easily be weaponized or used maliciously. As cyber weapons proliferate, and their demand on the black market grows, so too does the likelihood they will escape control and be used against the general population.

On March 7th, 2017, Wikileaks began publishing the Vault 7 project, a cache of leaked documents and source code from the CIA’s “covert hacking program”. According to Wikileaks, “the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized ‘zero day’ exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.” It also provides the general public with unprecedented insight into the growing generalized state of war in cyberspace.

Year: 2019 - Ongoing

Medium: Live Audio-Visual Performance

Materials: Raspberry Pis, Kali Linux, Custom Software

Offensive security tools are transformed into audio-visual instruments. Port scans, vulnerability exploits, wifi packet sniffing, deauth attacks, ping scans, and more are used to generate network activity that is converted directly into raw digital sound and raw terminal text in real-time.

Year: 2019

Medium: Multi-channel Audio

Materials: Cloud Servers, Honeypot Software, Custom Software, Raspberry Pis, Network hardware.

Credits:
Michael Zeltner - Networking Support
Sporobole - Sponsor

Here Be Dragons is a real-time sound piece that converts malicious intrusion attempts on internet-connected devices into an immersive soundscape.

Honeypots—Virtual Private Servers (VPS) disguised as corporate servers—are exposed to the open Internet, as an open invitation for hackers to attack. Network traffic from brute force attempts, port scans, and vulnerability exploitation are translated directly into raw digital sound, giving audible access to the notion of the Internet as a vulnerable “body” subject to hostile activities.

Today, low-intensity cyber conflict represent a significant proportion of Internet traffic. Although we are protected from much of this activity by firewalls built into our routers, configuration errors can expose devices in our home networks to the open Internet and attract the attention of harmful actors.

Honeypots such as these, along with other security measures such as intrusion detection and prevention systems, represent a sort of autonomous nervous system of the Internet whose complexity is similar to that of our own body. Could our experience and knowledge of connectivity be in the process of becoming a form of incarnated understanding expressed in these systems?

A collection of video works documenting a manual reset of my Instagram account.

Seldom do we consider how much we’ve given to social media platforms. We do so for numerous reasons—to be seen, to show off, to share something that moves us, to be desired. We share for others and ourselves, but also we share with the makers of the platform, who then share with advertisers, who are essentially buying our attention. These platforms are designed to maximized our engagement and as we engage, they become better at drawing us in. They are anxiety machines. It’s not far fetched to claim that these systems are designed (if not intentionally) to prey upon our anxiety through an endless feedback loop of production seeking satisfaction.

As an act of refusal, I decided to erase myself from Instagram and other platforms. These works are offer the most complete record of the process, or reversing my actions, retracing my steps. Rather than simply deleting and forgetting, I invite you, the viewer to take stock with me, to confront the visceral act of unposting, unliking, unfollowing, unarchiving, until all that is left is a pure, virginal headstone signaling my departure as well as my presence.

If you wish, you can request to follow my account @phillipstearns. Though I won’t accept, your request will persist. Occasionally, I return to check on the account to find a stray follower or that I’m following someone. These occurrences would otherwise go unnoticed. Perhaps they are accounts that were deactivated, resurging to life, or clever individuals who have managed to circumvent Instagram’s privacy features. Whatever they may be, they indicate a simmering broth of algorithmic activity that undergirds our lives on these platforms.

2017-ongoing

Jacquard Woven Digital Photographs

These works render visible the poetics of obsolescent media. A computer controlled Jacquard loom renders an image into woven fabric. This image is a photograph taken with a digital SLR camera of a television set, modified according to plans and schematics first developed by Nam June Paik. This modification allows the image to be bent and twisted, decomposed into lines and gradients. The images captured in this series were produced with sound waves, generated with custom software on a laptop and amplified using home stereo equipment. A strange assemblage of processes and electronic devices come together in a network of media histories. Each device and its treatment of the image, or encoding of a signal, leaves its fingerprint in this ethereal assemblage of artifacts.

(2017)

Extended Photography

Laser Bleached Archival Inkjet Print on Museum Paper

24"x29" (24.75" x 20" printed)

Each work is created in two layers:

1. The first layer is a flat image generated in a 3D rendering program in which 15 flags representing the governments, groups, and nations involved in the Yemeni Civil War are made to interfere with one another in a process known as z-fighting. The interference patterns are the result of a relationship of the virtual camera to the surface upon which the flags are mapped.

2. Rendered in the second layer is a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), a radar image of the Earth's surface. The elevation data sets the intensity of a laser that sears and bleaches away the pigments of the first layer.

Each piece features the DEM of a place of significance in Yemen's recent history of violent civil conflict, the current Civil War, and direct US military involvement in the country.

Year: 2014
Materials: Custom light fixtures, Geiger counters

A light installation with sound composed of 92 light elements, each representing an electron in the Uranium atom. Every light is connected to its own Geiger counter, making them responsive to ambient radioactivity.  Light is emitted in a brief flash, along with an audible click, when radioactivity is detected.  

This installation was inspired by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on March 11, 2011, when the plant was flooded by a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake.  The resulting meltdown in three of the plant's six nuclear reactors releasing substantial amounts of radioactive material into the environment.  It is the largest nuclear incident since the Chernobyl disaster in April 1986.

Stearns work quietly, subtly, engages the memory of nuclear catastrophe, while maintaining a haunting, even contemplative, environment.

Exhibition Info:

Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, 9/8/2017

NYUAD Art Gallery Abu Dhabi, UAE 9/2016 - 12/2016

Burchfield Penney Art Center Buffalo, NY 12/2014 - 3/2015

Reviews/Press: The National (UAE) | The Creators Project | io9 | Buffalo Daily Public | Buffalo News | Silverlake Voice

Year: 2013

Materials: Digitally designed and woven cotton textile
Dimensions:160cm wide x 205 cm tall

Fragmented Memory is a triptych of large woven tapestries completed in May 2013 in Tilburg, NL at the Audax Textielmuseum’s Textiellab. The project uses digital practices and processes to blur the lines between photography, data visualization, textile design, and computer science. The result are works of visual art that serve not only to render visible the invisible processes mediating everyday experience, but also to operate as distinctly tactile and lo-fi digital storage media—the process becomes a means to capture, record, and transmit data.

2016-Ongoing

Media: cut, sewn, and stretched textiles, wood stretcher

The fabrics used in Theories of Everything are expressions of algorithms that simulate entropic decay. They are the physical embodiment of code that follows the laws of thermodynamics. These algorithms–cellular automata–simulate life and death as only a computer can, in binary, as a procession of deterministic randomness, a predictable chaos that restructures the world. It's no coincidence that entropy gives direction to the arrow of time, building layer upon layer of noise upon noise, and yet somehow imbues our lives with meaning. Even the universe will experience a death of its own as its energy disperses, its warmth will fade inevitably to cold; absolute in its stillness.

Sound design and UX design operate simultaneously to condition our experience of a branded Operating System and to mediate or place our experience at a remove from what is otherwise obvious: that using a computer is hardly a smooth and seamless experience.

Using only a few lines of code, the default backgrounds of various Mac and Windows Operating Systems are scanned from left to right, using a strip one pixel wide. Each strip is repeated across the width of a single frame to create a stretched effect explored by artist such as Gerhardt Richter. The frames are then animated in sequence at 15 per second creating an evolving image that embodies the tension of being physically stationary while drawing information from multiple geographic locations at near luminal speeds, paralleling Roland Barthes's observation that for a fighter pilot, absolute speed becomes absolute repose.

The sound, where present, is produced by stretching the startup sounds to the full length of the videos.

Instant color film exposed to extreme high voltage.

Year: 2014

Materials: Neon, 3 channel Video w/ Audio, Projectors, Flatscreen TV, Media Players, Wire, Audio Amplifier, Speakers

A meditation on the contemporary interpretation of "landscape". The history of the landscape within art touches upon notions of identity, scale, location, and temporality. There is a timelessness about the topic of landscapes and their representation in various media throughout the arts. This work operates within the space of luminescent media technologies, addressing the mediation and re-presentation of environmental modes of being as present within various contemporary landscapes.

Raw canvas and weavings made by computerized jacquard looms from physical memory hex dumps are cut and sewn together.

An exploration of algorithmically generated color field weavings incorporated into a modular system of fabric panels. Panels are arranged to suit the space.

Year: 2015

Materials: Digitally designed and woven cotton textile
Dimensions: 5 Panels each 165 cm wide x 205 cm tall

vestigial ves·tig·i·al (vě-stĭj'ē-əl, -stĭj'əl) - adj. - Occurring or persisting as a rudimentary or degenerate structure.

vestigial. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary. Retrieved August 12, 2015, from Dictionary.com website:http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vestigial

Data from hidden crash recovery files are visualized to reveal startling structures and patterns. Rendered useless by interactions between incompatible operating systems and drive formats, this data maintained its presence, tucked away from sight, its former purpose now a distant memory.

Vestigial Data continues the exploration of textiles as visual and tactile media for data storage and transmission.

In the sense that photographic tradition now embraces electronically produced images via the digital camera, Vestigial Data explores the notion of post-digital photographic processes by treating hard drives and physical memory as digital equivalents to film. Through algorithmic processes of development, images are formed from snap shots of data stored therein.

DNA from the deadliest viruses faced by humanity in recent history visualized and woven into tapestries.

2013

Media: Sandstone 3D Prints

Listening to the Ocean on a Shore of Gypsum Sand is a collaborative project between Gene Kogan, Phillip Stearns, and Dan Tesene.  Seashells are 3d printed from algorithmically generated forms for the sole purpose of listening to the “ocean”.  The project questions the role of experience in the mediation of the virtual world to the real world and visa versa.

For those of us who have had the experience of listening to the sound of the ocean in actual seashells, it is a questions of lived experience shaping an approach, not only to the object (or world) at hand, but how it is perceived and acted upon.  Are we to trust these shells?  Do we seek out natural shells for comparison?

To those for whom their first experience of listening to the “ocean” through the digitally produced shell, the question becomes one of how the first encounter with a virtualized and simulated reality shapes the experience of lived space.  This virtual shell is all I know of the real, until I encounter those found in nature—and when I see this natural shell, what then is my experience of?  More broadly, how does mediated reality form our preconceptions of the world?

For some, these questions seem obvious—we may even have convinced ourselves that we have this all figured out.  We are aware of the possibility that the virtual world and real world are two interacting identities, distinct ideas that maintain their individuality despite their mutual influence on one another.  There is, however, a possibility that this distinction is fading with younger generations, as technologically mediated experiences permeate childhood.  I wonder about the effect of this as they grown into the world.

http://yearoftheglitch.tumblr.com/

Year: 2012

Materials: various software

Year of the Glitch is a yearlong glitch-a-day project by Phillip Stearns exploring various manifestations of glitches (intentional and unintentional / staged and found) produced by (digital) electronic systems.

Analog HD Video Synthesis and Signal Processing

Toward an open hardware and open source Analog HD video signal processing platform.

Still images from a test capture in preparation for a two-week residency at Signal Culture, where I’ll be diving into work on a new set of hardware based analog HD video signal processing tools.

Support from NYSCA via Harvestworks.

This piece, I can scarcely call my own. I have only the words that came to me, a distant memory, half paraphrased and misquoted: "Change the stones in a brook, change the way it babbles."

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