Patrick O'Brien Doyle at PERFORMANCE ART HOUSTON

Randomly Genderated Text is based on Freudian phallocentricism, feminist theory, and computer code. Men are 1's and women are 0's. Men have a penis and women lack a penis. This fundamental dichotomy creates language upon which all systems of thought reside and is inherently male centered. Every letter in the alphabet can be translated into a specific arrangement of 1's and 0's. Asking people to photograph their genitals will produce the 1's and 0's respectively and the order in which people participate will produce specific letters. The anonymous clustering of sets of eight genital photos will then be used to represent single letters. The opportunity to invert the 1's and 0's will produce different letters flipping notions of Fruedian gender theory. Giving material specificity (human genitals) to abstract concepts (letters, language).

Meditation Painting is about what gives value to a work of art. Participants are asked to give their time and energy, via meditation, to a blank canvas and thereby imbue it with value and worth. Participants names and the duration of time they spend in meditation are recorded as a record of the accumulated worth the canvas retains.

Aside from the rhetoric of what is driving these pieces, they are essentially participatory works of art that cannot be realized without the viewers' participation. They are fundamentally about relationship. The audience/guests/participants become co-creators and in this sense they are extremely important.