There is such fragility to certainty.

We live in the age of the algorithm - an ancient impulse to domesticate the wild, now pursued through data, surveillance, prediction, and efficiency. Its logical terminus is a technocracy in which every interaction can be monitored, optimized, commodified. The price is a world without genuine wildness, without chance, propped up instead by the dual illusions of control and certainty.

Paint the Stars began in information science, then in the writings of Vannevar Bush and James Bridle, tracing the internet's history to its present ubiquity and opacity. The cloud is a shit metaphor. It has vast materiality - phone lines, fiber optics, ocean cables, warehouses of humming computers, infrastructure routed through tax havens like Diego Garcia, Cyprus, Sealand, where ambiguity is exploited and geographies of power take shape. Inside it are the once-visible edifices of civic life - where we shop, bank, vote, socialize - now obscured, less open to investigation or critique. Understanding the cloud's form is how we begin to understand the operation of power itself.

The work's central footage - hyperlapse imagery of clouds in motion - was generated by subverting Google Maps, refusing its A-to-B efficiency. It says go right, I wander left. This isn't opposition to mapping technology but negotiation with it: the body as a site of resistance and reconnection, wandering as a way of re-examining one's place in the world. Modern mapping is also communal - our positions adapt the system, however narrowly it listens. Cloud-gazing and wool-gathering are inputs it was never built to take.

Sculptural computer towers - screenless, uninterfaceable - stand in for the always-on system we can't directly access or address. Left-wall poetics and right-wall text run in projected counterpoint, their cadence drawn from Ezra Pound's Cantos and Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, alongside a piano score balancing dark, high tones against light, low ones.

We have been conditioned to think of darkness as danger. It can also be a place of freedom - new beginnings, waiting to be illuminated.