Witness is an opportunity for the user to become an observer of activity on death row in the state of Texas. It is a screensaver that reflects the changing status of criminals, from living to dead. It updates itself daily with information provided to the public over the internet by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The project is certainly meant to have appeal for death penalty activists but it is worth considering that it might have just as much appeal for a certain type of sadist. This is of interest to me conceptually in that in my larger body work, I am trying to consider a relationship between distance and empathy within the context of digital media.   

My interest in distance is in the service of an exploration of the threshold of what it means to be "touched" by information. Touch as a computer science ideal, of course, suggests some kind of haptic or multi-sensual experience of an imagined three-dimensional space. In terms of distance, touch implies zero distance between the spectator and something they are meant to feel. My choice to juxtapose abstract rendering with information that is literally a matter of life and death is a question I'm posing about sensuality and spectatorship. I am interested in digital activism that takes information about the world and re-frames it in a way that people become either disgusted or amazed by their own presence in it.