Idle Hands Work Samples - Nathaniel Sullivan

Sample #1: Hand of God, Ghosts of Empire

2026, HD video, 11:25

Hand of God, Ghosts of Empire is a video collage that uses the hand as a visual symbol to thread together several nationalistic and economic narratives—the last gasp of an empire, the invisible hand of the mythical free market, and an insatiable desire for spectacle and consumption.

Sample #2: KAL 007 (audio sketch)

2026, Audio, 3:56

This short audio sketch combines music, broadcast material, and pilot communications as an early experiment with KAL 007. It does not represent the proposed installation or its final sound language, and the music may not remain. I am including it as evidence of process: an initial attempt to work through the archival material and begin finding a material form for the project’s interest in communication, interference, and feedback systems.

Sample #3: KAL 007 - Provisional Spatial Study 

This provisional spatial study maps the installation’s central relationships: opposing communication systems, acoustic leakage, feedback, listener movement, and periodic collapse and reset. Speaker placement, microphone sensitivity, feedback thresholds, and the reset structure would be tested and revised during the incubation period.

Sample #4: Before the Nation Went Bankrupt: Introduction

Excerpt, 2017, HD video, 4:47

On Friday, September 12, 2008, the CEOs of America’s largest banks were summoned to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Lower Manhattan to prevent the collapse of the financial system. Little is known about what happened inside the Fed that weekend—until now. 

Before the Nation Went Bankrupt tells the story of the financial crisis through the semi-fictional love letters of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Before the Nation Went Bankrupt: Introduction is an excerpt from a 37-minute video.

Sample #5: Before the Nation Went Bankrupt: Letter to Julia

Excerpt of live multimedia lecture performance, August 2016 @ Dixon Place, New York, NY, 4:06

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon writes a semi-fictional letter to his daughter Julia, comparing his failures both as a father and as a steward of the American economy.

Sample #6: Before the Nation Went Bankrupt: Letter to Bill Winters

Excerpt, 2017, HD video, 5:09

Monday morning, September 15, 2008. After a weekend spent at the Federal Reserve attempting to contain the financial crisis, Jamie Dimon writes to Bill Winters, his Head of Investment Banking at JPMorgan Chase, about the economy to come.

Sample #7: Before the Nation Went Bankrupt: Wall Street Audio Tour

Geotagged audio walking tour, 2021

I adapted Before The Nation Went Bankrupt into a geotagged audio walking tour of Wall Street. The piece was included in (RE)VERB, an audio augmented reality zine for spatially conceived literary projects and was hosted on Gesso.

Sample #8: Davosboros

2025, HD video, 6:44

Davosboros plunges the depths, into the psychic disorders of elite men. Psychedelic is a term from the Greek words psyche ("mind" or "soul") and deloun ("to manifest" or "to show"). It’s a tough time to be alive, for everyone, apparently. Certainty dissolves into absurdity.

Sample #9: A Vast Neoliberal Zion

Drift performance, 2019–present

A drift is a guided, experimental journey through an urban landscape. Not quite a guided tour, and not totally a performance, but something in between. Drifting can break our routine interactions with urban spaces and introduce new ways of thinking and being in cities. This drift through Hudson Yards included poetry, a quiz show round, a photo scavenger hunt and a re-mapping activity.

On this drift through Hudson Yards it is important to remember:

• Hudson Yards is not a neighborhood. 
• Hudson Yards is not a shopping mall.
• Hudson Yards is not an office or a residence.
• Hudson Yards is not a tourist attraction.

Sample #10: Why Financiers Love Abstract Art

2020, HD video, 5:31

You take a seat at the bar. A few empty seats down, a guy who appears to have been there for a few hours catches your eye. He has a confession to make. Based on conversations that I have had with finance professionals, Why Financiers Love Abstract Art is part of a series of animated text videos titled I Work in Finance, But Don't Hold That Against Me.

Sample #11: All That You Desire

Drift performance, 2012

All That You Desire: Get It All in an Era of Low-Density Hope was a drift through Wall Street in the guise of a business seminar on desire.

Participants were driven by limo to Wall Street and were given a guided tour of capitalism’s most iconic sites while discussing the merits of getting everything you want. We told stories, played games and immersed ourselves in the locations of unabashed desire. One of the things this environment teaches us (if we listen to it) is that the abstractions of the financial industry can also have a social function. Unmoored from our old moral codes by these abstractions, we are free to want, to get, and in turn, to want more. What would happen if everyone thought like investment bankers?