During the summers of 2006 and 2007 I collaborated with artist A’yen Tran collecting audio stories as we traveled on the Miss Rockaway Armada down the Mississippi River. While docked in small towns, local residents would visit the Miss Rockaway, offering us produce from their gardens, wisdom on navigating the river, expertise in fixing engines, and often sharing stories about their lives. Over the last year I have created a beta version of an online archive in which visitors to the Miss Rockaway site (frequently people from the Upper Mississippi region) can navigate down a map of the river and listen to stories in each town where they stop. Currently there are eleven stories on the map and ten more on the way. The final version of the site is scheduled to be live in the Spring of 2009. The above version is functional but slightly scaled down in size. See full size beta version HERE.



I have designed and maintained websites for the Miss Rockaway Armada and the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. These two floating projects are a far cry from anything digital. Yet, their websites have been a way for us to communicate broadly, publicly and collectively.

In the case of the Switchback Sea, I created a simple site that allowed for updates of performance dates on the fly.
Click on the image to check it out:

The Miss Rockaway Armada site is mostly a customized wordpress blog. It’s simple and not particularly beautiful (with the exception of the front page) but it enabled us to solicit donations, request engine parts, rope, and cookies, and also allowed our family and friends to keep tabs on us as we kept a blog while underway.
Again, click on the image:

While working as an educator at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice high school and community based organization I designed and built a cd-rom/website to accompany a handbook we published on how to create an integrated arts project. Each year at El Puente students, faculty and community members choose a theme to explore. All classes, arts programs, and community initiative engage in a project around this particular theme. At the end of the school year the entire El Puente community presents this work. Academic presentations, conferences, dance pieces, videos, murals, and poetry are just some modes expression used to gain a holistic understanding of the theme. Past themes have included sugar, garments, biodiversity, technology, self-determination, and war/peace.

Above is a functional version of the project constrained in size to fit this site. See the full version HERE.




director: Tim Sutton
cinematographer: Sam Levy

Good Kid blends fictional narrative and documentary as it follows Franklin Reyes throughout the course of one day in his life as a teenager and young father in New York City.



director: Jeremiah Crowell 

Marketbound is a feature-length documentary that explores how a generation of Cambodian women’s lives is being upended amid the push for the country to move towards economic and social “development.” The film ties together issues of development, globalization, the sex and garment industries through a compelling combination of characters including a sex worker, a minister of finance, and a community organizer working in the provinces outside of Phnom Penh. Marketbound is largely complete in its production and is currently awaiting finishing funds.
More information HERE.



Music video for Thrill Jockey recording artists Sam Prekop
director: Tim Sutton
cinematographer: Jeremiah Crowell



director: Tim Sutton
cinematographer: Sam Levy

Music video for Virgin Records recording artist Brendan Benson.



The Miss Rockaway Armada is a loose collection of artists, musicians, builders, travelers, organizers and dreamers. It includes members of Toyshop Collective, Visual Resistance, The Amateurs, The Floating Neutrinos, The Infernal Noise Brigade, The Madagascar Institute and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra.

We began working together in the cold winter of 2005 huddling in quiet spaces in New York, Seattle and San Francisco planning and dreaming, scrapping and fundraising. In the summer of 2006 we met in Minneapolis and floated down the Mississippi River on rafts we built ourselves from salvaged materials. We lived on the river for three months and traveled 350 miles, stopping in towns along the way to stage performances, to meet people, to make friends.

The following summer we continued on to St. Louis (at which point the current was too strong for our motors, and what was left of our boats became a part of Cementland) The Miss Rockaway continues to work together in various collaborative forms and we have recently created installations at Mass MoCA and the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands.

See more about The Miss Rockaway Armada at missrockaway.org




In spring of 2008 the Miss Rockaway Armada was invited to create an installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. In the spirit of our work building rafts, we used all locally scrapped and salvaged materials to transform the Hunter Mezzanine into a magical gathering place and a landscape of endless possibility. The project was a true collaboration as we worked together to build major structural elements that included seating and gathering spaces for museum-goers, students, and museum staff. We then focused on individual projects that included a micro-radio station of music and audio pieces made by collective members broadcast over clock radios, cabinets of curiosities, murals, interactive sculpture, and embedded monitors screening member produced video pieces.

In addition to working on the general build-out of the space, I created a wall of cabinets from doors found in the abandoned former textile mill and Sprague Electric buildings that are part of the Mass MoCA campus. Inside these doors museum visitor post wishes and memories that they’ve composed in another section of the installation called the Story Mill that features a seating area, old typewriters, and paper on which to type. In this way, visitors contribute their own stories to the installation.

More about the installation HERE.




In the summer of 2008 a group of artists, builders, performers and musicians collaborated with the artist Swoon (a founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada) to create the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. Swoon designed seven boats which were built from salvaged materials and launched from Troy, New York. The boats journeyed down the Hudson River to Deitch Studios in Long Island City, Queens, where they docked, connected to a large-scale installation of Swoon’s work. In towns along the river, the boats conducted a theater performance written by Obie Award-winning playwright Lisa D’Amour. Music was written and performed by Dark Dark Dark. The Swimming Cities project was also the primary set for the upcoming film FLOOD.

 More information on the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea HERE.