In 2016, as Syrian cities were being flattened due to civil war, trenches, walls and migrant detention centres were rising across the world to prevent the movement of refugees. Based on investigations conducted using aerial imagery and found footage, this film tracks the destruction of homes and the construction of anti-migrant infrastructures as intertwined processes dispersed across space and time.

References: Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, 2011. Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, Videograms of a Revolution, 1992. Hito Steyerl, Politics of the archive: Translations in film, 2008. Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts, 2008.

A multiplayer falling sand game utilizing cellular automata and WebSocket. A love letter to the falling sand games of my childhood and an experiment in imagining alternative digital commons.

References: Dan-Ball, Powder Game. Max Bittker, Sandspiel. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986.

A timepiece that depicts the life cycle of a dandelion mapped across 24 hours.

References: Ellsworth Kelly, Branch of Leaves, 1970. Wiktionary, dandelion clock.

A crater slowly engulfs the image throughout the day, everyday.
Made in collaboration with Max Ma.

Landsat.Earth is a low-resolution portrait of the earth as it appeared yesterday. It is made by combining all the images captured by NASA's Landsat 8 satellite in a single day. Landsat images have a coarse spatial and temporal resolution; they are taken 16 days apart and each of their pixels cover 30x30 meters on the ground. As such, Landsat images are ill suited to surveillance at the human scale and instead function as documents of planetary phenomena.

References: Doreen Massey, A Global Sense of Place, 1991. James Bridle, Landsat.me, 2015. Oraib Toukan, Toward a More Navigable Field, 2019. Roger Stahl, Becoming Bombs: 3D Animated Satellite Imagery and the Weaponization of the Civic Eye, 2010.

In 2014, leaked documents revealed that Canada’s Communications and Security Establishment used airport Wi-Fi hotspots to surveil passengers and tracked them for weeks after they had left the airport. The number of people surveilled in this operation is unknown even to Canada’s security agencies because of the automated, artificial intelligence backed methods used in contemporary data collection. The staggering scale of data being gathered by governments, militaries and corporations requires them to pair their surveillance infrastructures with AI to efficiently profile, police and profit. The Jack Pine combines live security cameras from around Canada with public AI software to paint the new Canadian landscape.

The Jack Pine is named after Tom Thomson’s famous 1916 landscape painting. This updated Jack Pine presents the new Canadian landscape, in which we hold our breath not at the serene coastlines of Southern Ontario lakes but at the scale and capacity of contemporary surveillance and AI infrastructures.

References: Citizen Lab, Snowden documents reveal CSEC used airport Wi-fi to track Canadians, 2014. Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen , Excavating AI: The Politics of Training Sets for Machine Learning, 2019. Simone Browne, Thinking A.I. through Rastus Robot, the Westinghouse Mechanical Slave, 2017.

I designed and developed the official website for the first edition of the data visualization focused Information+ Conference. A visualization to find connections between conference lectures is the centerpiece of the site.

In the summer of 1947, a British barrister who had never set foot in India used paper maps to sketch out the lines that would lead to its partition. Today, the border he drew is one of the most securitized spaces on earth. Thousands of floodlights installed along the border's perimeter render it visible from space in a bright orange hue, underscoring the power of pencil lines drawn decades ago. In my MA thesis, I investigate how British and Muslim political interests used cartography to construct, reinforce, and contest ideas of nationhood and statehood during India’s partition.

My thesis is accompanied by an atlas of the maps produced in the lead up to Partition. The glitchy maps in this atlas visualize the distorted geographies embedded in the maps which were used to design the borders lining South Asia today. The atlas illustrates the absurdity of governing and partitioning land using just pieces of paper, and brings into relief the cruelty of imperial logics under which paper is held sovereign over millions of people.

Named after Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights and the rare-earth metals that underpin modern computing, The Garden of Rare-earthly Delights is a shared digital ecosystem controlled by physical instruments. Using the Arduino microprocessor and a range of analog sensors, physical actions are connected to the The Garden's weather, plants and animals. People can interact with The Garden using a custom controller. Submerging the controller in water triggers rain, shaking the controller triggers an earthquake, and flashing a light on the controller causes sunny weather. Made in collaboration with Max Ma.

References: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1500.

News of the World is a procedural environment shaped by the text and images circulated by the news media. The World gathers the latest news stories every hour and uses their content and metadata to spawn figures, objects, and landscapes which interact with each other within the frame of a web-page. Face detection APIs are used to isolate the facial features of the people mentioned the day’s news and these features are then spliced together to produce news people which populate the landscape. News headlines and metadata are used to stitch together a shifting terrain in which the news people live. News of the World updates itself every five minutes with more creatures and features, transforming through exhibition periods and mimicking the world building powers of the news media.

References: Hannah Ritchie, Does the news reflect what we die from?, 2019. Nam June Paik, Beuys Voice, 1990. Jonathan Mahler & Jim Rutenberg, How Rupert Murdoch's Empire of Influence Remade the World, 2019.

I designed and developed a digital catalog for Worldbuilding, a virtual reality exhibition at held at Trinity Square Video in 2017.

All Freedom of Information Requests made to City of Toronto in 2015 visualized across four books.

A touchscreen Raspberry Pi build running a customized version of Conway's Game of Life.

References: Forensic Architecture, The Left-to-die Boat, 2012. Harun Farocki, Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988. Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective, 2011. Trevor Paglen, Some Sketches on Vertical Geographies, 2015.