Strange Positioning Systems came about, in part, through several discussions with media artist, Ebon Fisher, whose media rituals in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1990’s helped to establish vital channels of communication in that distressed and rapidly evolving neighborhood.  Fisher explored a variety of unusual strategies for mixing people and communications technologies and documented these community-based rituals in diagrams of information flow. These diagrams gave rise to symbols of network ethics, Zoacodes, which Fisher has floated in a variety of media, including the Internet and television.  One of Fisher’s Zoacodes has served as a basis for the SPS project logo.  The text component of that Zoacode is “Behold the Unclear,” a humorous celebration of the vital confusion that seems to run through the veins of the information age.

In my own work, I have investigated the idea of culture as an adornment: culture as a penumbra of expression radiating out from individuals and groups. Ritual and perceptual realities give birth to societies, but are our identities flailing about --self flagellating in the hope of an epiphany?  The stock market, a reflector of our gummy state.  Now that we are slipping and sliding through the portals of a gluttonous information god, do we still have a sense of self?  Where is that “self” positioned, personally, physically, economically, ethnically?   Throughout history it would seem that the building of the ego is based in part on carefully cultivated gesture and redundant ritual that hypnotizes, intoxicates, subdues and in a sense, controls information in-take and circulation.