The Ceibas Cycle the ceibas cycle is a ten-part, multimedia exploration of ghosts, glitches, and the aesthetics of entropy. begun in 2007, the cycle offers technological rupture as an interface; exploring geography, testimony, mortality and other hackable systems. centering around an understanding of archival memory and networked representation, these pieces attempt to redefine viability. for our cyber-organized culture, glitches embody the imperfections that allow for us to be complete. something fragmented presents itself as a dialogue and not simply as a vessel. in this spirit, the ceibas cycle serves as a home for these hacked and broken reminders—offered in all of their complex imperfections, so as to better celebrate our own.
by evan meaney
they believed the ceiba trees to be the points of connection, mending this world to the next. a place of rest, where the recently dead might pause, awaiting the arrival of their all-too-distant partners, so the next journey need not be made alone. i don't think it's a big secret that i made these for you. for you to know how to find me when the time comes as i am sure i will look different. the future will be full of memorials that we could easily mistake for disasters, and i just don't think they will be worth looking at without you there. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound 4m51s 2007
Ceibas: Prologue
claude shannon was the father of modern data compression. his legacy is one of sending, saving, and retrieving; reminding us that all things which survive this process are of the utmost importance. to him, information was a series of signals, marginalized in their presence and lamented in their absence, being the electronic values which carry what we know away from us, in the hopes that it will, one day, return unscathed. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound 5m54s 2008
Shannon's Entropy
a phone call, a bus ride, a body in crisis. memories in excerpt, borrowed and given. it is a communicable catalogue, one where the hopes of the missing intermingle with the expectations of the shown. a hide and seek love story. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound 2m34s 2007
The Unseeable Exchange of Our Parts
for a system which prides itself on an unwillingness to approximate or forgive, we should take pause and appreciate its fallibilities, as few others will. these well-intentioned exploits, cropping up here and there, not only permit our escape, but afford us a grand send-off. and though we may feel anxious or uncomfortable as we wait to change from one place to the next, we now have the rare opportunity to experience something confining from an unconfinable perspective. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound 10m53s 2008
Beneath the Pressure of the Sky
"el centro para la Investigación de datos perdidos, the honduran medical research facility, was abandoned in 2007. though specifics were never divulged by the honduran government, there were two things of note which found their way to the public sphere. 1) no survivor has ever communicated to the press the details of the centre's decline. 2) the centre's computer archives, originally thought to be destroyed, surfaced partially on two latin american web-forums. amazingly enough, these catalogues have come to serve a new function. part memorial, part library, part game". Hacked Archives Text/Color/Silent Ergodic Installation 2009
A Similar History
 a gallery of explored codecs. cyborgian portraits, separated from us by time and space, by formatting and compression—the very things we have come to use as reasons for history. the very things which we have put outside of ourselves for our own good reasons. these re-presentations, both file and flesh-based, in waiting and in celebration, suggest options for a deconstructable future. we have manufactured such systems to keep ourselves alive forever, and we are somehow dumbfounded when they grow old with us. besides all that, knowing you for as long as i have, i can't remember when you've looked prettier. Hacked Video Files Color/Silent 27 Channel Installation 2008
To Hold a Future Body So Close to One's Own
we have come to this place of meaning together. and, in our wake endures a long procession of stowaways: misspoken sounds we unconsciously omit, the limitations of our alphabet, the ignored gaps of an imperfect analog, and most recently these forgetful bits of the virtual. with each generation, they say a little bit more. now we share more than just our experience, finding the meaning changed through remediative revisions. finding more where we have come to recognize less. we revisit these evolving states constantly, together—a partnership, over and over. Hacked Archival Footage Color/Sound 3m21s 2010
We Things at Play
i know the day will come when you put me beneath the ground. and my body will wait and my lungs will push the trees up to meet you. gently as i come and go—know that, even the great archive of dirt and fire beneath me cannot relate what needs to be said, nor can the constructions we've built upon it, alternatively true and false. beloved, do not waste your worry on our failures to show and tell—they were never the most important part. not valued above our bodies below, nor our shared memories out there among the horizon line and the sky. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound Looping Installation 2009
Protocol for a Temporary Burial
fashioned out of home movies recovered from failing hard drives; this glitch-art video makes comparisons between different forms of memory—suggesting that, while error and decay may keep us up at night, they might also be the way we put our ghosts to bed. Hacked Video Files Color/Sound 6m42s 2012
Sigma Fugue
in part a remake of Hollis Frampton's Gloria! (1979), in part a re-purposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology; the well of representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. following the convergent narratives of several voices—ranging from the linearly historical, to the cybernetically personal—we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. one where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean. Hacked ROM Files Color/Sound 7m20s 2011
Ceibas: Epilogue—The Well of Representation
DVD FEATURES: + All Ceibas Cycle projects + Complete program notes + Interactive artist statement + System calibration + How-To-Glitch video tutorial
+ Request the DVD > Download the program notes