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“Call To Action” is a sculpture consisting of two receipt printers, positioned 7 feet high on a wall, connected via network cables to a wifi router below. Every 90 seconds, each printer prints a transcription and screenshot of a Tik Tok advertisement I received on my “for you” page between December 2023 and May 2024. These advertisements all have one thing in common: no product or service is being sold; instead, the content of these videos, in my view, resemble a form of new-age prayer. The people making these videos are searching (and paying) for acceptance, healing and catharsis.

(Click the gallery to read some of these receipts)

Execution of this project involved scraping data from over 500 unique video IDs using the Python library BeautifulSoup and several custom Python scripts. Data for this project is printed from a wireless server in the gallery running Microsoft Excel and a custom VBA script.

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Have your questions answered in a tarot-like fashion via tiny cat images sourced from the CIFAR-10 data set (a ~2009 era machine learning training resource). Conclusions are to be intuited by the user, with no legitimate algorithmic logic. Use Cat Chat here!

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"WWWShirt" is a T-Shirt consisting of nine QR codes and a username/password to a service that allows anyone to login and change the URL that the QR codes point to. The material is printed using a sublimation dye process, which, on cotton materials, causes the design to fade over time.

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A film in which I, Kevin Mead, experience the world as a raccoon.

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"Videos To Watch at Night" is a programmatic looping video installation intended for a storefront, gallery window, or other locations where digital signage is often present. It consists of several slow motion, brightly saturated video clips of subjects acting out exaggerated happiness, impersonating an amalgam of uncanny media such as eye contact practice videos, cult materials, and amusement park advertisements. The videos are programmed to begin playing in a loop in the same minute the sun sets beyond the horizon, using a client PC running OBS and automated scene switching software.

This work is presented here as a proposal. It was, however, exhibited as a barebones, fully-functional proof-of-concept in the Forum Art Space in Purchase, NY in May 2023.

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“Curse Machine”, a website visually inspired by 2000s net art, uses sound to perpetuate social myth. The website is simple: one mp3 audio element, three lines of text and one gif. On the website, the user is invited to curse a physical space using sound played from their device. If they change their mind, they are able to use the “Uncurse Machine” to undo the curse, and then curse the room again, and so on and so forth. By existing readily on the internet, it is a performance that everyone is invited to perform again and again in perpetuity. "Curse Machine" is a spiritual virus, hosted online, that can materialize into the real world.

The sound was principally created with microphone feedback using a shotgun microphone and stereo speakers. Use Curse Machine here!

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In this 10-minute looping video, I attempt to prompt "Elomia AI", a therapy chatbot with 4.5/5 stars in the App Store, to give me advice that is pointedly revolutionary or leftist. I do not succeed. The bot, in their last message before the free trial runs out, offers: "There is no one right way to react to the world."

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Satirical fake news piece about a murderous robot named "Ellie" who, in 2026, is released into the wild to save humanity from its own biological mishaps. Read here!