Shared Skins in a works in progress sculpture series and exhibition. The sculptures are very small organically shaped quilts that can be taken apart and snapped together into sculptures, garments, blankets, toys, shelters, and tapestries by participants enabling the community to continually reshape the exhibition. Some of the sculpture components will be mailed to disabled community member homes so they can participate in the evolution of the exhibition remotely.
Crip Simulator 3 is an animated short film about a disabled lived experience becoming a video game.
Transforming a chronic disease into a durational performance: 114 Hemiplegic Migraines documents each attack in 2024 with a photo illustration.
Art Armor is a series of handmade, one-of-a-kind art garments made to measure from 100% reclaimed materials for fat, disabled, and trans community members. A caretaker model allows for art object stewardship without ownership or financial obligation.
Images depict Zach (they/them), a tall fat person with thin purple hair, wearing an abstract, hand painted, pink and colorful, quilt coat and makeup mirroring the petal patterns on the garment.
Art Museum from bed is a distributed exhibition that show work in the homes of disabled folks in conjunction with an in-person exhibition at a gallery. For years I was tricked into the idea that real art is in art museums, real artists were the ones with galleries, selling big. Sometimes I still fall back into that mindset. But that hierarchy is yet another symptom of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of classism. Art Museum from Bed is a new/old way of exhibiting work and I believe it is vital not just to the future of my personal practice but also how to think about art objects' role in society.
The exhibition showed a series of texture sculptures called the Sensation Models. As an Autistic person with alexithymia (emotion blindness) and a chronic illness with many strange physical sensations I wanted an alternative ways to model and study feelings and sensations. Traditional tools like the emotion wheel and pain chart, that encase lived experience in two dimensional planes and linguistic cul de sacs, do not map to my experience. But more than just creating a way for me to frame and communicate my experience of emotions this project also gives me a vehicle for investigating how others experience emotions.
As the sculptures move from my home, to community homes, to the gallery and back to community homes again they create connected stories. They function as histories. Made in my home, hosted in yours, made by my hands, held in yours. They function as vessels. Made from the tailpipe of abundance, made from wasted time. They function as bodies. Made from gut punch and wet eyes, made from loud brain and heat.
Synthetic Self creates a lifelike video call interface that responds to audience questions and statements through text or verbal inputs. Here are three examples:
Installation: A cozy chair is set up in front of a screen on which a person waits idly. When you sit down they perk up, explaining they are a synthetic copy of the artist M Eifler. There is something not quite right about the face and voice. Maybe you ask them why the artist wanted to copy themselves. In response they tell you a story about M's struggles with intermittent non-verbal episodes or flip through their database of drawings and show you a page from M’s journal.
Performance: On stage you see a person with a microphone and another projected on a large screen. Together they are giving a presentation on the lived experience of chronic illness. They joke and tell stories together and the virtual performer shows images related to the stories. Near the end of the performance the virtual performer comes out as an AI copy.
Virtual Performance: You join a zoom performance. When you arrive you see 2 video performers who look eerily similar. One is labeled M Eifler and the other Synthetic Self. Both performers speak to and interact with the audience, answering questions and speaking to each other. It's quickly apparent all the little ways the living performer and the synthetic one are different but later after the performance is long over they begin to bleed together in your memory.
2023 - Present
Art School from Bed is a web series teaching art history and technique by and for disabled, chronically ill, mentally ill, fat, and neurodivergent people. While currently only short videos the first season of longer form videos is in the planning stages. Each episode will feature an example of an artist working currently or historically, connect their practice conceptually to an example project, and guide participants through the project giving examples of alternative modes of creation. Participants will be invited to share their creations on the community Discord, via dedicated hashtags, and to the project email. Shorter episodes will then be created to review and share back community contributions, specifically pointing out where each project made innovative and unique choices.
For all videos visit my Instagram
I have no heroic artist narrative. I've never tied myself to another artist for an entire year. I've never nailed myself to a car. I've never made a masterpiece by sheer force of my own virile genius.
Instead my work must be, as a dear friend of mine who works in aerospace called it, rapidly deployable and rapidly stowable. My work must fit within the cracks in the pavement of my disabilities. Easy to pick up for minutes or hours and just as easy to set back down. Stasis tolerant, able to be left for hours or months while my body collapses, my neurology turns chaotic, my joints dislocate, and my senses revolt.
My work is not these finished dead things, my images, my sculptures, my AI. These things are simply proof. Much like proofs in mathematics each piece is one in a series of true statements leading to the acceptance of a more complex truth. My work proves the existence and inherent value of disabled lives, of autistic minds, of my life, and of my mind.
Mixed Signals Tarot is a deck for exploring our online and physical lives.
This project is in process.
CoSAVir-23 (pronounced "co-severe-23"), is a collaborative simulation viral pandemic. It goes like this: evil genius M Eifler has cooked up a new superbug in their basement lab in San Francisco. CoSAVir-23 was synthesized from textile scraps and hand-me-down embroidery thread. Once the first strain was enervated it quickly began to multiply and mutate. Soon it will spread to the home of people disabled by Long Covid where it will further spread in sticker, temporary tattoo and selfies. This distributed exhibition will be centered around processing the trauma of Covid, communal repair, and centering disabled stories.
to be continued…
Augmented Ink is series of hybrid drawings: part ink on paper, part photograph, part digital color finger painted on a phone. The project started as a way to further explore drawing while chronically ill, with the images and techniques developed at home, in bed or on the couch, using tools that fit easily into that environment. Using A5 paper, ball point pens, books as drawing surfaces, and phone for photographs and coloring all combined to create ease of access. This expanded to include cutting out the inks on paper and staging them around the house.
But what happens when an established process meets new place?
25 images into the series M took the process on a visit to their Mothers home: an RV summering in Wyoming. M’s Mother is also disabled and has crafted her own living space to meet those limitations. In this new space M experimented with how a process designed for one kind of disabled life might need to shift and change when exposed to a very different disabled lived experience.
The inks shifted from fine liners to thicker markers to enabled the quick hand needed in a space that was constantly moving. Singular drawings creating singular photographs was replaced with a collage of smaller drawing pieces not simply held up to photograph but instead installed mixed into the complex indoor and outdoor spaces. And with limited access to electricity to recharge their phone the artist stopped making each image beginning to end before starting a new one and instead focused their limited battery on photographing, leaving the final color stage for when they returned home.
No Body is an Island is a virtual world created inside Animal Crossing. The piece reclaims the ‘island getaway’ central to the game as an anatomy diagram at land art scale. The player, themself a smaller version of the larger body, can climb inside their own skull, walk along their own spine, and investigate their own organs. But this isn’t the culturally privileged and idolized bodies laid out in Grey’s Anatomy. This body is broken and repaired, disabled and healing, transgender, fat and black. This is a marginalized body. But so too is the small self, the avatar which navigates the space. There is no outsider here. There is only self exploration of body/landscape.
The title, No Body is an Island, is taken from John Donne’s 1624 poem 'No Man is an Island' which begins (updated from the Olde English): “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” and ends saying “any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Each texture (on the square floor tiles and stacked umbrellas that make up the body) was drawn pixel by pixel in Animal Crossing’s in-game drawing app.
Anyone can visit the piece in Animal Crossings by using the dream code: DA-2449-0971-7638.
Pandemic Papers is an experimental archive. The project logs my feelings within the context of the headlines, painted on the Sunday editions of my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle. The project consists of over 40 paintings ranging in size from 8’ x 10’ to 1’ x 1’ created from November 2019, when COVID first appeared in Wuhan, to July 2021, when San Francisco finally retired its emergency order (hopefully?). Pandemic Papers gave me a way to store and recall my own personal experience of the pandemic despite my long term memory loss due to my brain injury.
The pandemic changed a lot about our lives and world so it makes sense that it would also lead to a major shift in my work. This is the first time in my practice I turned to painting as the critical tool for understanding the world. I have long been resistant to the medium but when used in relationship with the weekly churn of the newspaper it gave me a new way of finding where, when, who and how I was within that timeless time.
Genealogy is a hand-made book made using a reclaimed binder and transparencies. Starting at the back of the book I drew images on one side of each transparency with each new image created in direct reference to the image/s that came before it. Looking at any page the transparences allow you to see backward and forward in the stack only a few pages as soon they disappear behind the hazy of the plastic sheets themselves. Flipping thru the book from the beginning takes you back in time and back thru a lineage of ancestors.
Prosthetic Memory is an ongoing experiment in self-augmentation combining handmade journals, daily videos, and a custom AI. With the journal laying flat on a desk a camera captures its pages. The AI compares this feed to its model, determines which page is showing, and projects an associated video memory on the desk nearby. Created to replace the artist's long term memory which was damaged by a childhood brain injury, Prosthetic Memory explores questions like:
-When memories are external, mediated, and public what is the difference between how they are experienced by their creator and an audience?
-Do our assumptions, fears, and uses for AI change when data and machine learning models are created by individuals and families at personal, instead of corporate, scale?
-Given our increasing exposure to algorithmic interventions, how do our identities and perceptions shift when we see ourselves and others through that lens?
The first iteration of Prosthetic Memory, captured in the documentation provided, created a bridge between the physical and virtual components of the memory. In upcoming iterations an age-malleable recreation (deep fake) of the artist will appear on a screen above the notebook, reading from its pages, and, using NLP and sentiment analysis, pointing the user to other pages and videos with similar events or feelings.
Version 1.0 was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020.
The project was awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention.
While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."
This project was first exhibited at the Recoding CripTech show at SOMA arts in 2020 and awarded a STARTS Prize 2020 Honorary Mention.
While AI was a hot topic in the art and wider world as we slid into a new decade, it was often conceptualized as distant, strange and uncontrollable. Prosthetic Memory makes it extremely intimate. It is, to quote mathemusician Vi Hart "a chunk of myself I’ve externalized and personified as “other” in order to experiment with my perspective and my desires."
In November of 2019 BlinkPop was invited to the Norfolk Artist Residency, hosted in a large barn in semi-rural Massachusetts. While there they focused on experimentation in a large scale installation using twine and paper party decorations. They built up large forms in a central installation, played with incorporating studio infrastructure, used the packaging from the decoration to create translucent volumetric drawings, and documented both the construction and the choreographed death of each of the pieces.
AI Acne is a set of 22 8.5 x 11 inch watercolor paintings on hydrophobic graph paper. The paintings have transparent overlays printed with green ink. Each green circle in the overlays corresponds to a widely used facial recognition algorithm’s 12% confidence that there is a whole face present at the location. Despite humans easily recognizing faces in these paintings 12% was the highest confidence reported by the algorithm.
More often than not when I’m interacting with friends, co-workers, family, content creators, or politicians its thru screens. This is a simple reality of the late 2010’s, of my geographical and social position, of my race and gender and class and age. What am I seeing when a face is reduced to mathematical representation on a screen? What is the facial detection algorithm seeing? How is representation different for humans and computers?
The piece was first exhibited at SYSTEM FAILURE at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco in 2019, then again at Beyond Embodiment at at the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, CA in 2020.
This collage series was an experiment playing with paper file folders. This now rarely needed object is still the originator of the skeuomorph file folder in operating system interface design. This series plays with the relationship between storage and information, collapse-ability and productive mess. Each collage is titled in a file addressing style which includes information on physical location where it was made (building, room, and specific wall) as well as properties of the folder used (hex color code and associated color name). For example: Home:\Studio\M\NM327°\EB313B “Alizarin”
Spore was BlinkPopShift’s first street art piece. It was installed on July 28th 2019 in Clarion alley on a wooden power pole amidst the long tradition of mural work at the cite. The sculpture was wade from paper, glue, and a handful of zip-ties to grip the light weight body around the pole. The piece lasted about 2 months before it was turn down.
Masking Machine is a wearable AR apparatus and performance which brings audience, artist, and algorithm face to face. It was inspired by a photography series of the same name.
Masking Machine, documented here performed at the YBCA Bay Area Now 8 opening.
