CAPTCHA Emails (1-5), 2013

Created in collaboration with Nicholas Arehart. CAPTCHA Emails (1-5) take personal email exchanges between the two artists and convert them in to art works that utilize CAPTCHA aesthetics. The works also integrate images of iconic art works by artists like Sol LeWitt, Yayoi Kusama, and Cy Twombly.

CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.”

These works were made in conjunction with neverhitsend, and presented in the basement of 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles.

neverhitsend is an eleven person collective that formed in the wake of the 2013 Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Founded in Los Angeles, neverhitsend performatively researches communications ideologies. The primary action of the collective takes place within a continually in-progress draft email in a shared gmail account. What started as a single gmail draft quickly expanded into a several-thousand word collection of links and discussions around privacy, communication, the possibilities for resisting surveillance, and the serious play available to friends, colleagues, and co-researchers responding to contemporary issues in mass data collection and processing. Communications on the draft are autosaved, though never sent; this is a re-performance of a technique previously employed by Al Qaeda and David Petraeus.