Two male figures traverse one another across a long east / west line, enacting carefully choreographed movements constructed from landscape paintings, the penmanship of letters, shipping routes of books, and traceroutes of networked information.

Circulation Room is a durational performance, text and technology-based response to Preston Bradley Hall, the site of the circulation room of the former Chicago Public Library. The work began with the development of task-based and textual responses derived from research into the history of the space, its architectural elements, and an archive of documentation from the "English Book Donation," an initiative by which 8,000 texts were shipped to Chicago following devastation of the great fire.

Simultaneous to the live performance, original and sourced texts and footage, collected, catalogued, and remixed by a computer program, were projected onto the windows of Preston Bradley Hall, transforming the room into a machine disseminating and circulating visual and textual information.

launch web component* of Circulation Room

*Notes: This is 1 of 4 windows from the live installation. The web component is in-progress.

In its current stage of development, a web program is scanning the list of texts shipped to Chicago as part of the English Book Donation. It then searches for these texts in Project Guttenberg, a contemporary initiative resembling the post-fire book donation in its attempt to preserve 'the library' and traditional literature in the increasingly virtual information age.

The texts gleaned from the web are written to a database and are 'matched' with pre-recorded video performances. If the text is not found in Project Guttenberg, you see only the title and original book donation reference number of the missing volume along with the video. A new volume will not be searched for until the video is complete. Videos may be up to 7 minutes and are often nearly still.