Parker is an installation artist, kinetic sculptor, educator, and mechanical engineer. His work questions digital technologies in contemporary music, art, and architectural practices; translating from the physical to the virtual. He believes these translations are not lossless, that what is vanished is a sense of presence, or what Walter Benjamin defines as object aura. The physical object is slowly tranquilized and replaced with less potent simulacra of itself.
Cybernetic algorithms have largely informed modern conceptions of intelligence, thus ignoring the ways in which naturally-occurring physical systems also form networks encoded with complex information. The quantization of analog information, from complex continuous data to discrete digital data, from unfiltered information to 1’s and 0’s, is a process which intentionally simplifies and restructures the natural world in order to increase accuracy and control. Parker's work seeks to voluntarily relinquish this computerized regulation in favor of an analog aesthetic.
Parker teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, on the Design for Performance and Interaction MArch.