The book Attention's Loop began with my wish to document a single sculpture by photographing it again and again, in many different poses and in different kinds of light, to find the limits of its emotional range. The sculpture is itself jointed and movable, designed to assume a wide range of anatomically subtle body positions in space. My search for its gesture has always been an important part of its formal presentation; and I have employed it as well in film animation works. I proposed to photographer Katherine Wetzel the idea of assembling a portfolio of poses, and our subsequent work engaged her lighting design and photography, and my sculpture and choreography. I later added a second sculpture to the project. In our work together, each image emerged as an interweaving of our responses to one another's ideas. We pursued a double intent: to record in detail a self-evidently mechanical object, and at the same time to draw out of that object a convincing illusion of human presence.

And precisely this double intent is the book's subject, its text written during and after the photographs were made, always with the images before me. I am driven by the mystery of the human body as a biological organism on the one hand, and on the other a personality -- with memories, plans and desires. How do these things emerge from the cellular mechanics and chemistry of the body? The book is laid out as a series of image-text pairs, with each two-page spread forming both an entity in its own right, and a part of a growing accumulation of cross references that address and enact this double order of being. The text itself is a ruminative "voice-over" that travels across the divide between subject and object -- on one page the sculpture itself appears to speak, on the next, it is addressed from without. I think of this book as a kind of cinema-in-the-hand: an animation. My performer, a self-portrait, is mobile and doubles back; the notion of the loop emerges as the voice itself anticipates, remembers, laments, and speculates.