I make situations that often involve sound or music, but are not about sound or music. Instead, they are about things like “the spontaneous organization of individuals around the act of paying attention” (as Herbert Muschamp once put it, apropos of something else). My work is more likely than not to skew the conventions of its presentation, to play with the norms of behavior, to dislodge the princess from her throne, the singer from his microphone.

Mostly, I am interested in the experience of encounter; in what the spectator brings to the place and time of art, in what I can bring, in how we can make something of the encounter that diverts us from the mainstream of experience. Art, like citizenship, is both a right and a responsibility.

My work gnaws at the foundations of instantiated cultural concepts and conventions. I like to sit in the basement of the edifice and nibble on the wires until the building goes black. (It's not for nothing that 'art' and 'rat' are anagrams.)

I've presented my work at venues spanning the cultural spectrum from CBGBs to Tate Modern. I've created art works for the radio on both sides of the Atlantic (left and right), published a book on music, One Reason To Live (Errant Bodies Press, 2006), and broken two cervical vertebrae (3 and 4). My sound and music is available on seven or eight CDs, plus two unavailable Peel Sessions. In 2005, I completed a Ph.D. in Aesthetics at the University of London and I am a Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. As we speak, I'm writing a book called In The Blink of an Ear (Continuum, 2009), on the mutual influence between the sonic and gallery arts in the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

My research is underwritten by the traditions of art theory, continental philosophy, poststructuralist literary theory, and sound studies. Rather than seeing the various media of artistic production as distinctly concerned with issues of their individual specificity, I start from the conviction that critical approaches applied productively in one medium yield similarly fecund results when brought to bear on another medium.

My critical/theoretical work focuses on three primary themes: 1.) The interplay of the sonic and gallery arts over the past 60 years and the emergence of the category of "sound art"; 2.) Issues of representational fidelity in art, sound, and theory; how representational and semiotic codes can productively fail to correspond to their intended referents; 3.) Conceptualism’s correspondence with contemporaneous trends in continental philosophy; and the legacy of conceptual art as manifest in current practice.