Information is a muse as rich for mining as the elements, religion or politics, and the viewing scale can range from micro to macroscopic.
My work manipulates information to see it in new ways, visualizing information that isn’t intended to be experienced visually and creating patterns during that transmutation. The text or data is transformed by assigning color, density or other qualities (e.g. orientation) to the information. Differing sets of information require individual approaches, and once I have developed a transcription method then it is systematically executed by hand, often on a hand-drawn grid. My transcription systems are necessarily simple, but the ideas behind them have at times incorporated molecular structures, crystallography and encryption. I have applied these transcription systems to information ranging from missing pages from a book, weather statistics, logarithm tables and casualty lists from Iraq to randomly generated number sets.
Most important, the original information must touch me in some way - either through beauty, utility, my curiosity, or the work it has taken to accumulate.