artist statement






Joseph Squier’s work occupies the contested territory between presence and absence, between the body and the screen, between the analog and the digital. For over three decades, his projects have taken the form of single images, image sequences, database-driven environments, audio collages, interactive installations, and net-based experiments that layer image, text, and sound into nonlinear constellations of memory, place, and identity. Through these evolving forms, the work resists closure and cultivates instead a poetics of instability—of ambiguity, impermanence, and haunted beauty.



At the core of Squier’s practice lies a fundamental belief: that the world is best approached not as a fixed set of objects or meanings, but as an unfolding pattern of relationships—emotional, technological, temporal. His artwork invites viewers into dynamic spaces of interpretation, in which each encounter reanimates a different thread of association. The image is never just a record; the word is never only a caption. Meanings arise in motion, shaped by both machine logic and human memory.



This sensibility is perhaps most fully realized in works like Flagrant World, an early and influential example of electronic art originally developed in Adobe Flash. Drawing from an extensive archive of prose fragments, altered images, video vignettes, and found ambient audio, the work offers no singular narrative but rather a recombinant engine of affect. Each user session becomes a unique traversal – sometimes tender, sometimes dissonant — through Squier’s layered aesthetic of emotional residue. Like the palimpsest cityscapes it evokes, Flagrant World operates as both archive and improvisation, where personal loss and social critique merge in a feedback loop of perpetual revision.

Throughout his exploration of interactive and generative systems, Squier has also remained deeply committed to the practice of creating individual photographic images. These works, often made in parallel with his digital experiments, are published both electronically and in traditional photographic print formats. Some of his most recent artistic output has taken this form. These single images function simultaneously as autonomous artworks and as components within larger multimedia ecosystems. They are shaped by the same aesthetic and philosophical concerns that animate his system-based work—particularly the enduring themes of memory and embodiment. By continuing to explore the still image, Squier sustains a tactile and intimate register of expression, one that complements and informs the more dynamic architectures of his interactive projects.



This logic of the archive — both as a site of preservation and of fragmentation — also informs Urban Diary, a long-form multimedia artwork that chronicles the psychogeography of contemporary urban life. Structured as a collage of images, short prose fragments, and appropriated data, Urban Diary reconstructs the city not as an architectural space but as a psychic map — a record of wanderings, disruptions, traces. Rooted in the artist’s own experiences of walking through, living in, and remembering multiple cities, the piece collapses spatial and temporal distinctions, layering present-day visions over decaying signage. The work reveals a deep attention to what often escapes formal histories: discarded objects, spontaneous gestures, domestic disrepair, graffiti, weather, decay. It is a diary not of events but of encounters.



Squier’s commitment to the hybrid, at once poetic and technical, derives from a long-standing engagement with both visual and verbal languages. His training in photography, painting,  and media arts shaped an early fascination with how images function rhetorically, as arguments and as evidence. His studies in literature and philosophy deepened this with an understanding of narrative structure and the politics of representation. Rather than choose between these disciplines, his work finds power in their tension. A photograph is never presented as mere index, and a line of text is rarely explanatory. Instead, both become provisiona, fragments to be held in proximity, interrogated, and layered.



This layered approach is not only conceptual but material. Across projects, Squier employs a range of technologies, from cameras and audio recorders to real-time JavaScript systems and networked databases. His works have integrated images and audio with generative randomness to create systems that are less “authored” than orchestrated, assemblies of elements, each capable of recombination, mutation, and drift. In this sense, the artist’s role becomes less that of maker and more that of listener, editor, curator, and witness. The work is built not to declare but to invite: to invite reflection, disruption, and associative drift.



Underlying many of these projects is a persistent attention to memory, not only as a theme, but as a structural logic. Memory, in Squier’s work, is not an archive of facts but a shifting terrain of affect and association. His systems mimic the ways in which recollection functions: partial, recursive, nonlinear, shaped by emotion as much as chronology. In place of traditional narrative arcs, the works employ loops, overlays, interruptions, and absences. Sound bleeds from one image to the next; fragments of a story repeat in altered form; visual motifs reappear months or years later, now altered by context. The result is a formal language that feels closer to dreaming than storytelling.



This attention to the fugitive and the ephemeral carries political weight. By centering what is overlooked, discarded, or neglected, the work resists dominant systems of categorization and control. The fragments that populate his projects — the broken window, the handwritten note, the outdated map — speak to lived experience in its granular specificity. They become testimonies not to capital, power, or triumph, but to survival, presence, and witness. In this way, the work enacts an ethics of attention: a commitment to seeing what has been made invisible.



At times, this ethical impulse becomes explicitly pedagogical. In his years as a university educator, Squier brought these commitments into the classroom, encouraging students to think across media, disciplines, and genres. His teaching emphasized experimentation, risk, and critical inquiry, and his own work often models these same values. Projects are not planned in advance with fixed outcomes but evolve iteratively, shaped by new discoveries, failures, and collaborations. This openness has enabled his practice to remain responsive to new technologies and shifting cultural contexts, without ever becoming trendy or reductively digital.



Squier’s relationship to technology is marked not by fetishism but by skepticism and inquiry. Tools are adopted for what they can enable — layering, timing, distortion, interaction — but never allowed to dictate the form or meaning of a piece. His work remains grounded in human experience, even as it explores the interfaces and networks that increasingly mediate that experience. The digital becomes not a subject but a condition, a medium through which to reframe fundamental questions of presence, loss, memory, and embodiment.



This framing is evident in Flagrant World, which explored how browser-based artworks could dynamically generate unique aesthetic encounters by drawing from online image databases, text banks, and audio archives. This project did not merely display media but collaged it in real time, constructing ephemeral constellations that disappeared as quickly as they arose. In one configuration, a fragment of a children’s song might overlap with an archival police radio; in another, a satellite photo might dissolve into handwritten text recovered from a lost notebook. These assemblages defied easy interpretation, privileging affect over argument and resonance over resolution.



Yet despite their complexity, the works remain accessible. There is no need for specialized knowledge, no instruction manual. Instead, viewers are invited to dwell, to observe, to follow their own patterns of attention. The pieces reward slowness, a willingness to linger, to listen, to look again. This slowness is itself a gesture of resistance in a culture driven by speed, metrics, and distraction. The artworks propose a different tempo, one that values subtlety, ambiguity, and the long arc of care.



In sum, Joseph Squier’s work is a sustained inquiry into how meaning is made and unmade in contemporary life. It is a practice rooted in hybridity, driven by curiosity, and animated by a deep attention to what others discard. Across decades, media, and platforms, his work continues to ask: What does it mean to remember? What does it mean to listen? What does it mean to make something — however fleeting — that might matter to someone else?



There are no definitive answers in Squier’s work. Instead, there are fragments, encounters, glimpses. There is the sound of wind in a broken window. A name scratched into brick. A story half-told. And in that incompleteness, in that refusal to resolve, something essential is made visible: a world still being assembled, still being grieved, still being imagined.