Machine Care and Rebuild

The rebuilding of the house and studio is not merely a backdrop to the recent work. It is one of the conditions that made the current form of the practice inevitable.

After a plumbing disaster flooded the basement studio during the unrest that followed the murder of George Floyd, making had to continue under constrained and partial conditions: limited space, deferred setup, materials in storage, machines unavailable or only partially usable, and a daily life organized around incompletion. Years of rebuilding have meant living alongside a studio that existed more as future than as full present.

That long interval changed the work.

Machine care, organization, maintenance, labeling, storage discipline, repair notes, startup rituals, and cautious use of tools in compromised space stopped feeling like support work and revealed themselves as central methods. Care for participants, care for machines, and care for a space not yet fully available began to occupy the same ethical field.

This helps explain why recent work takes infrastructural form so often. Privacy-forward systems, image-consent workflows, memory appliances, field manuals, educational platforms, and documented instruments do not mark a departure from the earlier art. They are forms shaped by a period in which continuation required procedure, legibility, restraint, and the refusal to lose the thread.

A rebuilt house and studio do not simply restore an earlier condition. They change the horizon of the practice. They make possible a return to fuller use, but they also preserve the lessons of constrained making:

Suggested short site version:

Years of rebuilding under constrained conditions made maintenance, machine care, and space stewardship central to the work. These are not side chores; they are part of the practice’s structure.