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Mars Observations exists as both an artist’s book and a series of larger, individual paired prints. It continues work I began 14 years ago with my series "Signal to Noise" and "Dry Reading," which were also books of paired prints in textual frames that lead a double life as wall objects.

Visual themes running through the series may involve a formal or color resonance, or center on subject matter in which the camera is used as a collection device for visually related forms or objects.

Textual themes may have more to do with what the text looks than what it says, though not always. I create readable text through various techniques involving "processing" by several custom computer programs. One involves getting text from web sites that have information somehow related to the images and rearranging the words randomly. I comb the results for interesting or seemingly meaningful phrases, which I then emphasize in some way. In fact, the series title came from the random phrase "Mars observations judge science." (I like phrases like "supercooled fact" and "visual number light" because they come full of mystery and grace out of the blue.) Or sometimes I write a program that will search a computer dictionary for words with certain characteristics, like having another word imbedded in them or having a certain number of characters.

The computer has been my art-making tool of choice for well over two decades, and it is essential to my approach. If given a choice I will use the computer even if things can be done more efficiently by other means. ("To a carpenter everything is a nail.") But I have always felt that I worked outside the mainstream because I prefer the computer for its ability to create new relationships, locate patterns, organize and paginate, rather than as a "collaging" or "effects" tool.

The pictures in Mars Observations come from my own camera. Since it is important that "Mars Observations" have a factual, documentary appearance, l use photographs that have an illustrational quality to them. While I want the pictures to have an appealing aesthetic quality, I also want them to appear to be examples of "something", even though it’s hard to say what the "something" is.