Keith Tilford is a delightfully nerdy Seattle artist and writer. His last art series, seen at James Harris Gallery in 2006, was pencil drawings of crowds made up of such small, pixelating marks (some resembling tiny letters of the alphabet) that the crowds looked atomized, as if they'd been hit by nuclear disaster but their ashes simply hadn't fallen to the ground yet. Tilford, fashionably at the time, used downloaded internet imagery for those, and the current series again feels right in time with the crystallographies of, say, Ann Lislegaard's sci-fi-based videos (seen at the Henry in 2009), or Joseph Park's prizmism paintings, or Thuy-Van Vu's portraits of scrap wood piles jutting out in every direction, or an installation like Free Dissociation at SOIL in 2007—a series of morphing and disintegrating images of local construction sites by Thom Heileson and Wyndel Hunt. Dislocation, or a hunger for location, appears again and again, like a symptom. It's interesting that Tilford's paintings appear in the same season as the release of the book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum, the very idea of which is reassuring—that there could be a center to the internet at all. Blum tracks the undersea cables, the glass fibers, the command centers (in Seattle, the internet is located in the Westin building).

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