These projects are grounded in a sustained inquiry into the boundaries of materiality, pursued through an ongoing engagement with both traditional and emerging technologies. Central to this approach is identifying the most effective means of realizing each concept — a design process that may involve any combination of available tools for generating forms. The methodological openness is guided by themes from nature, minimalism, industrialization, domesticity, and the urban environment, with a particular interest in liminal spaces — those transitional or in-between places that resist easy categorization.

Each piece is born out of experiences with domesticity, mental health, meditation, and an image-based economy of needs. There is no shortage of content to draw from. Newer pieces are informed by earlier work insofar as all objects in the studio are subject to the possibility of being absorbed into other objects in the studio process. By responding to current events and themes in culture with these aesthetic values in mind, 404deadlink is attempting to take a position against modernism as it relates, institutionally, to people. we aim to make objects that are seductive and simultaneously grotesque enough to elicit a somatic aesthetic experience. We exercise our right to the means of production.

Much of the work on 404deadlink is about stress and durablity. The right kind of stress is training, making one fit in mind or body. Too much stress or force is realized as abuse or trauma. This continuum is elastic, such that each new project is a position for the body to take against the status quo. As projects in the art studio evolve like thoughts, they take on meaning as containers for self-awareness. Meditation and technology are skills and tools to exit or change the shape of the container of our self-awareness.

We explore the intersection of liminal spaces and freedom of expression. There is safety in the anonymity that can be achieved in liminal spaces, particularly online, and there are transgressive elements that lend themselves to opportunities for social justice and censorship resistance. In a Deleuzian sense, we think virtual and physical worlds are connected rhizomatically, containing, in them, layers upon layers of interconnected passages. Whether the space is virtual, or concrete, placing signifier-portals in these architectural and psychological phases interests me. Jean Baudrillard said that, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer proceeds the map, nor survives it.” The chain of signification is the substance of this work.

Mechanical bodies are synthesized from textbook references, anatomy, and architecture to form dysmorphic animals. They reflect a playful distrust of social interactions and perception. They may express our anxieties toward the domestic and industrial spaces. They are on the social rails, responding to our taboos. Our houses reflect our perception of shelter and need for safety. Real needs and real bodies may be at odds with the architecture that we inhabit.

Drawing and writing are the backbone. While currently exploring the seams of several mediums, video, photography, sculpture, and sound, drawing serves a primary function for planning and completing projects. Drawing is the code I write in to myself and it is the stitching across mediums. Drawing is a complete activity, and it is the place from which all things emerge.

Money collages explore the objet d’art in notions of social inequity, currency, and stores of value. Various pieces rearrange and juxtapose imagery, social and functional, some vandalizing state-issued currency, others converging images to problematize otherwise “innocent” images. The BTC bullion incorporates modified fiat bank notes submerged in acrylic blocks. Each block is drilled out to hold a paper wallet scroll. The holes were then covered with security stickers, physicalizing the bitcoin and challenging the location of value in the objet d’art.

we hope to be creative in ways that help people escape attachment to expectations or outcomes for their desires, and we intend to collapse the false dichotomy between seduction and repulsion in a way that makes people freer from suffering than they were before they arrived.

Vidoe mandalas incorporating found footage into meditative circular forms. Liminal spaces, flow states, meta-reality.