Most of my participatory public projects take as a point of departure a speech act: our ability to make promises, taking an oath, lying...

One one of my favorite quotes is by J.L. Austin is “I bet you a dollar it will rain tomorrow.” It is so simple, and yet it contains in it our desire to predict and/or control the future, and capitalism’s reduction of everything to monetary value. Each of my past public art projects has addressed relevant issues to our public discourse, such as trust in each other, the veracity of a public statement, our ability to make and keep promises, our belief in oaths, and the barriers and openings that determine what is public and what is not. Recently I have been focusing on the overlap between gambling games, systems of divination, and systems of prediction. What events belong to Fate and which belong to Fortune? My studio is a chaos of invented playing cards, homemade gambling chips, and made up felt game boards. When thinking of the coming election, and in general, our future under the multiple crises that are afflicting us –I had a strong intuitive feeling that we were in a hold up: “Your money or your life.” Like betting a dollar on rain, “Your money or your life” makes me think of how absurdly our choices have been framed.

‍