.:|:.Education.:|:.

I received my BA from Mount Holyoke College, where I wrote an undergraduate thesis titled "The Affects of Pain: Marina Abramovic through Aristotle, Nietzsche and Artaud." My art-based research and video projects at SAIC in the Visual and Critical Studies department examined Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and experimented with documents as physical, aesthetic objects and ideological, political forms. My MA thesis was "Liminal Documents: Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."

I can be contacted at hcwinter [at] gmail [dot] com.

       .:|:.Current Work.:|:.

I created and curate a group for political video art on vimeo, I recently authored The Manifesto for Future (Video) Art, and I am working on several new videos. My video works have most recently screened as part of Experiments in Cinema V 5.1 (Albuquerque, NM), The 6th Berlin International Directors Lounge 2010 (Berlin, DE), LOUIS V. E.S.P, MIRROR/WINDOW, (Brooklyn, NY) and as part of the Duration Screenings, (London, UK).

My work can be seen in print in Useful Pictures (2009), edited by Adelheid Mers, and my project Paris Soldes >>> Sales!!! Bling ta' Boom, documenting the economic crisis in Parisian store fronts, was featured online in ITCH e.3 and Slate's Ten Great Photographs of the Economic Crisis. I have and maintain a blog, Swallowing Church Bells.

I document graffiti + street art in Paris, Barcelona, and just about anywhere else.

+ i03-04 (10:21) (2008)
+ i02-08 (8:58) (2008)
+ i02-09 (3:09, 9:52, 19:58) (2009)

All these video pieces explored US detention sites and the War on Terror using documentary materials. Through collecting visual and verbal documents linked by physical location and digital materiality (metadata, geotags), the video pieces in this series (4) aimed to examine the space between perspectives. Above all they all asked viewers one question: From whose perspective are we seeing?

In the title, the numbers indicate the years the materials span while the lower case "i" (e.g., ipod, iphone) gives a nod to the sharing, web 2.0 technologies that have allowed these contentious, charged materials to freely circulate.  i03-04 focuses on Iraq and Abu Ghraib. i02-08: State of Emerge)ncy and i02-09: We Interrogate the Detainees focus on Guantanamo Bay.

The pieces use cut-up text from transcripts, especially the CSRT (Combat Status Review Tribunals) and the Washington Post's PDF's of Sworn Statements by Abu Ghraib Detainees. The use of text took its cue from Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain and the idea that torture is defined by the destruction of language. Screen space typically reserved for subtitles was used to indicate shifts in subject through horizontal and vertical line breaks, italics, the conservation of typographic errors, nonnative English mistakes, and elements added during transcription, ex. [REDACTED] and ///End of Statement///.

i02-09: We Interrogate the Detainees (2009)

This piece was a two part multimedia installation and performance work first presented as part of Antipodes '09 Festival Europeen des Arts Indisciplinaires at Le Quartz in Brest, FR.

       .:|:.Installation.:|:.

A video was installed in a small dark room. In one take, that video showed a styrofoam cup being turned inside out without breaking. Excerpted text was from Jack Hitt's interview with a former Guantanamo detainee from This American Life episode #331. i02-09: We Interrogate the Detainees is a shortened version of the original video paired with the first part of a 21 minute track we called "Polystyrene Noise," which we made only using noises made by styrofoam cups by Dow Chemicals. The space was open to the public. Images can be seen here: i02-09: Installation.

      .:|:.Performance.:|:.

I enter holding a styrofoam cup.

I scrape it along the walls.
I make noises with it on the floor.
I listen to the walls with it.
I turn it inside out without breaking it.
I place it on the ground away from my body.
I break it.
I leave the space.

Duration: 25 minutes - 1 hour.

i02-09: Habeus Corpus is a three minute video documentation of the performance. At no moment do you see my complete body, and the piece was created using close-up segments from still slide photographs of the public performance. The performance documentation video confronts some of the same issues the piece tried to address: fragmented, secondary documentation of something you cannot (did not) see. Perhaps not insignificantly, it has been my least popular video work. More typical documentary images, however, of the 2 public performances can be seen here i02-09: Performance and have proved quite popular.

How to Party Like it's 2003 (in Abu Ghraib) (2008)

This piece was an installation part of a group exhibition at the Alogon Gallery in Chicago, IL. A complete set of images, including video stills, can be see in How To Party Like it's 2003 (in Abu Ghraib).

The installation included three sets of 12-step instructions, 1 TV + emergency preparedness tent + 3 US military medical kits containing Vivarin, Robitussin, strobe lights, LED lights, chem- sticks, colored gels, copper wire, handcuffs, blank dog tags, women's underwear, CD player, mini speakers, OutKast's 2003 Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. The TV played i02-08: State of Emerge)ncy.

Instructions were created from Tara McKelvey's book Monstering: Inside America's Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.

Liminal Documents: Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib (2008)

+ Liminal Documents: 12 Maps United By Nothing (2008)

 "Liminal documents are created in the space between images and documents that does not exist."

500+ Guantanamo detainees went through the CSRT process after its establishment in the summer of 2004. That process remained opaque, ostensibly because of its reliance on classified evidence, until the spring of 2007 when the Department of Defense placed "14 high-value detainee" Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) files on its website.

Taking those documents as a starting point, Liminal Documents: Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib collected documents into an artist's book divided into two volumes. The first, gray volume contains documents establishing the CSRT process for Guantanamo detainees, the 29 page CSRT transcript of detainee ISN 100BZ, and a series of fourteen classified and unclassified government exhibits lettered 'R.' The second, orange volume holds the documents of detainee ISN 100BZ and exhibits, including maps, letters, and photographs, labeled with the letter 'D.' A selection of 30 pages of the 144 page project can be seen online here or a complete PDF of "Liminal Documents: Between Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib" can be requested via email.

"Liminal Documents: 12 Maps United By Nothing," was a mapping project created for the SAIC web-based project Invented Archives. Larger versions of the 12 maps created for that project can be seen at Liminal Documents: Invented Archives.