Early Works

Wikipedia defines the “big red button” as a device used to launch nuclear weapons. It also refers to an authority figure as “having his/her finger on the button” and notes that the red button is symbolic for “self-destruct.” push the red button is an interactive installation that examines collective meanings of technological control, ideology, and mass destruction. Participants are presented with a large, illuminated red button, emblematic of such big red buttons of control or destruction. When pressed, the button retrieves a phrase from a Google search on “push the red button,” “push my red button,” or “the red button.” While the participant is placed within the realm of the authority figure by pushing the red button, they are simultaneously denied the ability to have control of this act because the Google search visual display is random. Confronted with war, control, freedom, and sexuality, participants are left to question the ubiquity of pushing the red button in the cultural imaginary.

Hole(s) of Non-Teleology is an interactive video installation that examines video feedback and the queer act of anal fisting. Live video feedback is set up in a space and projected onto a wall. Based on the number of participants listening with the installed headphones, the video feedback projection becomes interrupted with video of anal fisting and audio feedback. The piece oscillates from a technological abstraction of queer sexuality to a “group sex act” between installation and participants. Hole(s) of Non-Teleology poses the possibilities of a queer technology, suggesting that a formal and technical relation exists between video feedback and anal fisting.

A tv plays static, which is projected onto a wall. A camera, on a live continuous delay, records interactions in the projected space and plays it back onto a separate monitor. Based on audio levels in the environment, unpredictable patterns of feedback emerge from the delay monitor.

A mannequin is split in two and surrounded by a series of probing cameras and television monitors. The mannequin, itself an abstraction of the human body, is undergoing a medial operation or examination. While the mannequin is typically thought of as a rendition of the outer surface of the human, the operation records, or extracts, the “insides” of the mannequin and presents this on a series of monitors, giving the mannequin’s newfound depth a new surface, which is the video monitor.

Video static is projected onto a pillow. Where a head would rest, there is now scrambled, empty signals of information transmission. tv pillow awaits the head that will sleep on it, filling its frenetic signals with thoughts and dreams.

Nine photographs of mannequin parts are photocopied, beginning with an original and continuing by photocopying a copy of a copy of a copy. Each photograph is copied nine times, resulting in 81 photocopies. As the image is continuously photocopied, it reaches a tone stability; some body parts disappear quickly into black while others remain in abstract globs of white. photocopies asks where is the body in the image when technological mediation appears to have disappeared the figure. Why do some body parts remain visible, while others are erased?

Samples of the artist’s blood, piss, spit, and shit are displayed and presented as live feeds on video monitors. What can a closer look of insides on the surface of the screen reveal?

A camera is pointed at a blank analog video monitor and detects the cathrode-ray scanning process, an act typically not perceivable during television spectatorship. Similar to medical equipment that reveals biometric information on bodies, such as heart rate or temperature, the camera exposes the “life pulses” of the monitor.

i am your friend follows the encounters of a mannequin, exploring dynamics of abuse, submission, and distortions of communication.

• 16mm, color, 6 min.
• Written, directed, shot, and edited by Zach Blas
• Filmed with a 16mm Bolex on Kodak Vision 200T Color Negative stock
• Sound recorded on mini-disc
• Edited on a 16mm Steenbeck

Loose construction of Karl Jasper’s theory of the encompassing: human imperfection striving towards unattainable truth and divinity–a knife. Wittgensteinian mathematic language games, although homoerotic, fail to conjure a logic and reality beyond the stab of social order.

• 16mm, black and white, 3 min.
• Written, directed, and edited by Zach Blas
• Filmed with a 16mm Arriflex SR on Eastman Double-X stock
• Sound recorded on Nagra
• Edited on Avid DV-Express

I am a real nobody who loves Jude Law.

The outlines of dead bodies that have been dismembered, shot, and run over reveal their insides to be poetry.