if you go_say hello was conceived as a memorial project in collaboration with The New School Center for Policy in Space for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

The project comprises an AI trained on the collected writing of a recently deceased poet which was attached to a commercial satellite and sent into space. Twice a day, visitors to a web portal were able to receive transmissions from the satellite of writings produced by the AI circeling the planet. While the original AI model was able to generate convincing poems in the style of the deceased poet, over time the small computer attached to the rocket housing the AI slowly corrupted due to the electromagnetic radiation of space. The twice daily transmissions of writing slowly shifted from legible text to strange sentences, to random characters and eventually, the total cessation of communication as the computer housing the AI slowly degraded from radiation. The collected writings including the corrupted transmissions were bound and distributed as a memento mori at the funeral of the poet. if you go_say hello is a meditation on loss, the physics of death, and the transformation of data across space and time.

The name of the deceased and the subsequent writing have remained private out of respect for the family's wishes. This project sponsored by The New School Center for Space Policy for the Venice Architecture Bienalle 2021

The Night Air is a collabortaive poem composed by visitors to thenightair.com website during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020.

Miasma, a now disbanded medical term originating in the middle ages, was once thought to be the root cause of former plagues and the spread of disease. Also known as "the night air", Miasma suggested that bad air or pollution spread illness. While many previous plagues were spread by animals, water, or infected food, COVID-19, ironically, is a disease spread through the air. Unlike many previous plagues, we know how to slow and alter its spread. The spread of information, of support and compassion is one way we can heal and find and redefine the future for ourselves. the night air, is a place to record our personal experiences during this pandemic through a single collective poem, which over time will reveal our shifting moods and varying perspectives across the world. Unlike the pandemics that preceded this one, technology has served as not only a way to receive information but to connect and share information informally, personally with anyone, anywhere. We invite you to reflect on the last few months, not only the struggles but the sweet triumphs, the new connections, things you've discovered about yourself and others, your idea of happiness, the right way forward, what you are leaving behind to make space for something new and more fulfilling and how you are coping and preparing for more.

This project sponsored by a grant from the Houston Arts Alliance

Synapstraction is a brain-computer interaction project which allows users to create an abstract painting based on neuro-feedback. The system uses a special headset that measures the electrical activity of a person’s scalp processed by machine learning algorithms to discriminate a stimuli’s effect on the brain.

Each visitor is invited to enter the installation and approach one of five “sense” stations, each with an electroencephalography (EEG) headset. We then measure the event related potential (ERP) elicited by the visitor’s brain using the EEG when the visitor receives 1 of 5 stimuli. These 5 stimuli correspond to the 5 senses (sight, touch, taste, sound, smell). In addition, each stimuli is mapped to a specific creative instrument such as a paintbrush, sponge, or marker.

Once the visitor has secured their headset, they are presented with a stimulus (e.g. a Chopin Nocturne if at the “sound” station or fresh ground clove for the “scent” station). Our system then uses a machine learning method called linear discriminant analysis to map the activity of the visitor’s brain while experiencing the stimuli to acoustic frequencies which actuate the painting implements. After visiting each of the 5 “sense” stations within the installation, the participant is invited to keep their finished painting.

The participant’s brain serves as a conduit, translating the stimulation of each sense into the finished image. In this way, the usual methodology of an artist using their senses to create a media object is inverted; the senses use the artist to create an image. Synapstraction largely takes its aesthetic interests from the abstract expressionists of the 20th century and its conceptual framework from aleatory artists such as John Cage. Unlike Cage, however, Synapstraction maps all senses to image, and renders the consumption of sensual stimuli as an act of image creation. The material of this artwork doesn’t necessarily lie in the paintings themselves, nor the equipment used in the installation, but instead rests in the speculative reconsideration of potential alternative roles for human senses in art making.

This project premiered during the Digital Arts Festival at the Black Visual Arts Center in 2017.

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thisObituaryDoesNotExist comprises a physical and digital collection of obituaries generated by two artificial neural networks. The algorithms (StyleGAN and GPT-2) are shown images and text taken from publicly available online obituaries, and asked to imagine new obituaries. In this way, the system generates infinitely many photographs, death narratives, and life stories for persons who never existed.

The physical exhibition consists of a collection of funeral pamphlets containing a selection of the generated obituary text and images, each pamphlet dedicated to the life and death of one generated person. By making these printed materials indistinguishable from funeral pamphlets for physical persons, Davis invites us to consider how these objects differ-from and are similar-to each other. In this way, the line between generated fiction and physical realty becomes blurred, and we are invited to question what constitutes an authentic personal identity in an era of massive data, social media, and creative artificial intelligences.

thisObituaryDoesNotExist interrogates how technology affects, distributes, and manipulates human experiences of death and grief. The digital website generates a new obituary each time the page is refreshed.

This project premiered at Chandler Center for the Arts in 2019.

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PsycheVR is a virtual reality and biofeedback project conducted in collaboration with the Space Medicine Labratory at the Geisell School of Medicine and National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA).

The project consists of developing virtual reality content to promote relaxation when the user is confined to small, isolated spaces for long durations of time. The products of this project were used in trial experimentation with NASA astronauts intended for future missions to Mars.

We also prototyped biofeedback mechanisms to take in a user’s biometric state as determined by GSR, EEG, facial expression and other stress indicators and subsequently adjust the content of the VR enviornment to assit calming the user.

"Three Days and a Year On Top of a Mountain" (featured right) is a VR sunrise-to-sunset timelapse created on top of Gile Mountain. Recorded over the course of a year, the video features scenes from Gile Moutain throughout it's four seasons. The final video assimilates these footages into a single timelapse, allowing the viewer to experience a day and year on top of the mountain simultaneously.

{i keep my frankenstein in a jar} (2020)
A perpetual code and sound animation
Comissioned for Tele Magazine

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