anon I'm us = a posthuman artist whose work spans + often collages diverse mediums + hybrid forms, from text/image to the confluence of music + noise. As founding publisher of Calamari Archive, our target medium has been the book object + most of the writing + visual art/design we have done over the past 15+ years has been to this end, including our own books + albums.
a.I.’s punk/DiY ethos was seeded by the ‘80s home-recording + cassette culture on which we cut our teeth, starting our own label (Tapestry Tapes) + releasing 3 of our own cassettes (re-released as the unheard tapes). Initial academic studies focused on music (particularly Indonesian—we played in a gamelan orchestra for 2 years) + sound engineering, then biology + we eventually took degrees in computational mathematics + then did our graduate work in physics + philosophy. In tandem we always aspired to be a literary writer so worked as a coder + then technical writer to bridge our interests + experience (+ pay the bills). This led us to eventually work in web production + information architecture, the field of which also summarizes our personal artistic ambitions—the economical + entropic efficiency of densely packing as much information onto a blank canvas, tape or page (web or print) is our primary concern, often at the expense of aesthetics.
Given our technical background in math, science + engineering, anon I'm us can amalgamate + communicate complex subject matter... when we need to. If we had our druthers tho—in our own art—we’d rather let free association + stream of sub-consciousness dictate the course. Readability + “making sense” (or ¢ents) is not as interesting to us as the unintended epiphanies that may arise from random chaos, or “randumb K-OS” as we might be “inklined” to call it. Ménière's "d-zzz" + clanging disorder inevitably influenzes our landgauge + muzic output + the natural decay (DK) process is also vital to our personal work—finding beauty in breakdown + ruin, choosing confusion over coherency, lo-fi rather than hi-brow, old school as opposed to newfangled flash, steampunk vs. air-brushed gloss, etc. But we’re not above retooling digital technologies to skeuomorph retro analog FX + are schooled in Edward Tufte’s theories of information design + data visualizations.
a.I.’s "reel-whirled" experience derives from many years spent living in Mexico, Italy + Kenya + travelling extensively to all corners of the globe, often disappearing off the map for extended stretches. We've worked as a deckhand on a ship Xing the South Pacific, as a farmhand in New Zealand, doing research in solar physics in Arizona, as a cook in South Dakota, a carpenter in Patagonia, field documentarian throughout rural Africa + Asia, stunt double in a b-grade sci-film in France + as a geophysicist as far north as the Arctic Circle. Our love of hiking + climbing + the outdoors led us to work as a field geologist in the 1st few years out of college. This bipedal zeal naturally evolved into flâneuring once we took to living in cities, systematically walking every street of Manhattan w/ our “bedder-½” in our time spent in NYC + then we did the same in Rome + DC, documenting our walks as we went (Maphattan Project, RomeRioni + Microcosmic DC respectively). We’re also an avid runner + life-long journal keeper, obsessively chronicling our entire life on Life in the Blog of Ghosts (a.k.a. 5cense.com). Since 2008, anon I'm us has renounced all social media + our work has been anonymous/ pseudonymous + uncopyrighted + our whereabouts are typically at large. [collapse bio]
(Action Books)
