First Principles is a performance that uses humor and logic to play with the notion that reason is a fundamentally desirable and unique human quality detached from materiality. Using text-to-speech AI, the cloned voice of the artist plays out from the speakers. The voice reads three phrases from Descartes’ seminal text that declares the human mind separate from the human body. Each word of each phrase has been incrementally replaced with a synonym until the entire sentence dissolves into nonsense. The AI voice stutters and mispronounces, exacerbating its inability to communicate. The artist plays a game of logic, employing an if/then function to direct a series of actions using oranges, cheeseballs, and a hula hoop while repeating the words spoken. The performance is ‘programmed’ to engage in alogical and apparently meaningless tasks. Engaging the artist and audience in a real-time cognitive exercise, First Principles remains constrained by the performance’s material structure, creating points of dissonant tension between experience and perception. ​

First Principles, Oranges, cheese balls, artificial tree, plastic chair, tables, hula hoop, plastic table cloth, foam, kitchen timer, tape, balloons, shaving cream, 15 min duration, CASP, 2024-7