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CAPTCHAS My current body of work is based on a visual form of computer security called CAPTCHAS (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). A CAPTCHA is a challenge-response test that requires the user to identify a word or words that are distorted and or placed on a cluttered field. This test is used to give human users access and to deny access to bots (typically programs used for spamming). Today's current programs are incapable of passing a test that works on a human's advanced pattern recognition ability. The ability to fill in missing information and discern meaningful shapes that have experienced some form of image degradation, and still form a whole picture. The handling of the medium tends to be aggressive which I have tried to intensify by replacing the Basic English dictionary with Nadsat, the language from Clockwork Orange. If you can read the word, you are human.

SYNESTHESIA "The contemporary artists best chance to fulfill his mission is abstract art." Huelsenbeck, Richard. MEMOIRS OF A DADA DRUMMER, University of California Press, 1969. p. 89. In response to Huelsenbecks comical last words in Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, I made the decision to pursue abstraction. Facing a myriad of possibilities I decided to develop a strategy in which my choices would be limited. My first choice was to use modernism as a means of dictating style; reverence of the art object, flatness, no brushstrokes. My second choice was to include a theme using references to elements in B-movies and Fantastic films (aliens, creeps, robots, etc.). My third was to make the title of the painting the subject, by using synesthesia* to make the letters into visible colors, resulting in pure abstraction. *Synesthesia is believed to be a cross-wiring in the brain, such as colored letter synesthesia, where the person experiences the letters on a page in color rather than in black and white. Their visual perception and their perception of color are crossed. The colors for the letters in my work were pre-chosen by a colored alphabet, established by persons with synesthesia.

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