Sunny side up, scrambled or hard-boiled: how would you like your eggs? Eggs Any Style ! is an interactive performance about food, conversation and you.

For anyone who walked up to my luncheonette counter, I cooked them one of the eight most common types of eggs: scrambled, sunny side up, fried over-easy, over-medium, or over-hard, poached, soft-boiled and hard-boiled. As I was preparing their egg, we would talk about a childhood memory or I'd ask them to describe their last kiss. 

Eggs Any Style ! premiered in The Argonauts, The Wassaic Project's Summer Festival's performance program, in Wassaic, NY on Saturday, August 3, 2013 from 11a-4p.

Photos: Jason Huff

Printed in The Wassiac Project's Silkscreen Shop.

The title of this project stems from a fable: As a philosopher lay on his deathbed, one of his students asked, “Is there anything more you can leave us with before you go?” He answered: “The best thing I can leave you with is the pattern of my ways.” This is a powerful idea: that action trumps wisdom; tacit trumps explicit; that what you know viscerally trumps what you know intellectually. Deep learning and understanding comes not through what can be told, but through observation and experience.

"The Pattern of Your Ways" is based on both the past and present of a farm in North Dakota that has supported my family for generations. Through performance and working directly with the land, I began to familiarize myself with the agricultural livelihood of my Czech great-grandparents, and in turn, begin to build a relationship with them through learning from how they chose to live. 

WNYC's RadioLab ran an episode entitled "Limits" — the show covered the experience of Julie Moss, the IronMan triathlete who in 1982 famously collapsed only 400 meters from the finish and finally ended up crawling across the finish line (urging herself to "get up, just keep moving forward...I can crawl, and I crawl"). They also talk about the Central Governor Theory which is the idea that the body has a circuit that regulates a person's physical exertion — it will send out chemical signals to make the person feel pain or tired, which should encourage them to rest and save their actual reserve of energy. (The physiologist David Jones has conducted great experiments dealing with this phenomenon.) August Bier noticed in the early 1900s that a psychiatric patient could jump almost as high as the world record — hinting at what a person could be capable of if their central governor was lifted.

With these stories in mind, I began to think about how a psychological state could influence a physical one — Anti-ATP is about trying to defeat my own central governor. Each cell in the human body houses an organelle called the mitochondria, which produces adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which provides energy for the cells and the body. When ATP is being used up, the central governor signals the body to feel tired. Using my armspan as a guide, I drew a circle until I had used as much ATP in my right arm as possible and could longer ignore my central governor.

With the "Richter" series, I tried to take my aesthetic out of the process. Following a Dadaist impulse, I created a set of parameters that would determine the path and results of the work. Using my body as an extension of my pen or camera, I recorded the movements of my body as it was shuttled along in the New York City subway.

Richter were made by standing in the subway, eyes closed, allowing my body to be moved by the train as it hurled along the track while gently holding the pen to the surface of the paper. Through my body, the movements of the train are recorded on the paper.

This project is based on the individual ability to hold one's breath — I was interested in both duration and will and how those two elements affect each other. This was the first of my projects exploring how a person's will power could overcome their natural, physical desire to do something as important and life-sustaining as breathing.

Each person was instructed to hold their breath for as long as they physically could.

This experiment looks at how light refracts. These images were made through hammered glass windows in an apartment building on Flatbush Ave, at night, only using traffic and the stores across the street as light sources.

"Hold Still" was completed in the last months of analog television broadcasting in the United States. Focusing on the flickering, waving, vibrant colors and repetitively rising horizon lines of detuned cable stations, I looked to archive a disappearing aspect of technology (a visual byproduct of analog broadcasting) and to create large, colorful abstractions allowing the viewer to navigate through the partially or fully obscured images, creating their own narrative.

Both analog and digital cameras were used in this project. Each camera differs in film or sensor size and image quality, exploring the mechanical limitations of each and touching on the current transition in photography from analog to digital picture taking.