The 'Assets' series consists of electric cattle brands, tools-as-artworks, that link logos, symbols, and other branded content back to their origin: physically branding something living as bounded property. Suspended in an interior window as a part of the DOMAIN ALPHA show, two heated electric cattle brands glow with emitted heat like more subtle, visceral neon signs, depicting mirror images of an 'X' and an '.IO'.
The 'X' symbol was chosen for its associations of spatial claiming: a variable to be solved for, a box checked, coordinates marked. In a site-specific iteration of the series, one wall of the 'Viewing Room' exhibition was branded with the 'X Asset' brand.
The '.IO', meanwhile, was chosen for its colliding symbolisms in computer science and geopolitics. '.io' is a top-level domain (TLD) popular in the tech startup community for its 'input/output' (I/O) associations. However, as a country-code, TLD, it stands for the British Indian Ocean Territory, a highly restricted site in the Chagos Archipelago that saw thousands of local Chagossians illegally evicted in the late 1960s to make way for a joint UK-US military base still operating today. As a work, '.IO Asset' suggests that these violent, imperialistic exertions of dominion underpin shiny, purportedly neutral web domains.
electric branding iron, plastic handle
12cm x 8cm x 42cm