Jonathan Carroll

Pallet altars. Vertical lines. Screens. Can-based servers. Local memory in physical form.

Four sculptural altars. A production chain. Family histories of labour and migration. A local archive kept off the cloud.

• Four pallet altars move from kelp to nickel to nails to curtains. Commodity history becomes family history.
• Each altar carries an archive in a can. A single HTML file. A tiny server. Documents, images, and voices speaking from different positions in time.
• The songbook and ballad treat “Nickel Nail Curtain Kelp” as an archive you carry in your throat.

“What if we kept our own genealogy local, offline, ungoverned?”

“An archive you carry in your throat.”

Constants. Relations. KPIs. History. A small control room for political economy.

A browser tool for thinking through Marxist categories numerically. Constants go in. Relations are built. Values are recomputed. History accumulates.

• Users define constants: workers, hours, wages, output, price.
• Users build relations between those constants and force recalculation.
• The interface keeps tables, KPIs, system messages, and a historical log of changing conditions.

“The thesis as an economic simulation of relationships between items in the archive.”

Starter, circuitry, timing, drift.

Fermentation, signal, amateur instrument building. Bread starter meets oscillator logic.

• Sourdough becomes a circuit metaphor: rise, timing, culture, feedback.
• Kitchen process becomes sound process.
• The zine holds the project’s notes, images, and thinking.

“Fermentation is synthesis by other means.”

Curtains, boots, diagrams, simulation, memorial research.

Joint work across Unity, curtains, looms, boots, and memorial forms. Textiles. Disaster. Counter-archives.

• Player / Piano / Loom / Worker — Unity field, bronze boots, cast limbs, invisible timers. 9/11 appears as “both extreme and regular under capitalism.”
• Party in the Front, Disaster in the Back — double-sided curtain, bronze boots, halyards of cloth. A didactic textile archive for Halifax Explosion memory and local labour stories.

“Disaster capitalism is a game board, not a plaque.”

“A counter-archive of local memory of the Halifax Explosion.”

Compatibility, values, type, relation.

Collaboration with Melanie Evelyn. The Valentine’s Day Artist Collaborator Quiz turns taste, compatibility, and working method into a browser game.

• Artist matchmaking built from alignment charts and value sliders.
• Participants move across multiple continuums and generate a collaborator profile.
• The interface stays light. The social diagnosis stays serious.

“A collaborator quiz as a tiny social machine.”

Infrastructure, timing, support, restraint.

Technical direction for Nadine Sures’ thesis show. Sculptural scores became lighting, sound, and timing systems.

• Show control, microcontrollers, and cabling.
• Light, sound, and movement followed the work’s score, not gallery defaults.
• The technical system became part of the piece’s tempo.

“The technical system is part of the score.”

Signal, warning, interval, code.

Collaboration with Vanessa Iafolla. A custom lamp blinked Morse-code messages. Financial-crime research became a slow signal in the room.

• A lamp circuit translated text into Morse.
• Debt, investigation, and regulation arrived as intermittent light.
• The lamp worked as both evidence and omen.

“A patient, blinking omen.”

Sections, matrices, case studies, future chapters.

A working structure for the thesis. Archives. Panopticons. Genealogy. Intelligence software. Oral tradition. AI positionality.

• A scaffold for the full written project.
• Case studies move from Ancestry and PROMIS to songs, looms, altars, and memorials.
• The outline defines the conceptual frame for the semester’s installations and tools.

“Archives in the Panopticon.”

Scaffolds, matrices, case studies, diagrams.

Texts that hold the semester together. Archive theory. Media theory. Moral diagrams. Computational reflexivity.

• “Archives in the Panopticon” maps archives across hegemonic / counter-hegemonic, singular / multiple, time / space, active / passive axes.
• Chaos-magic and alignment-chart research treat diagrams as moral maps and interface logic.
• The bibliography tracks labour history, media theory, archives, computing, and occult form.

“AI as archive-of-archives.”

“The archive hides the stacks.”