Counts has worked in a wide range of contexts and locations, including a performance on the side of a mountain in Japan, a custom-designed bus that made Times Square and the surrounding streets its stage, an immersive environment for a program of spatial music for symphony orchestra presented in a drill hall, a six-story video tower in a planned community in Florida, and two immersive adaptations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy: an evening performance in a series of walk-through installations in a 40,000 square foot Brooklyn warehouse, and an escape room maze in Midtown Manhattan.
[citation needed] At Skidmore, Counts also created the "Failure Series", an open forum of experimental performance concepts that continued after he graduated under the leadership of collaborators Ian Belton [8] and Yehuda Duenyas.
These artists commonly explored subconscious or non-literal dynamics generated through collisions and confluences along the intersections of visual art, literature, music, sound, and live performance.
[citation needed] When he moved back to New York City, he co-founded GAle GAtes et al.[citation needed] After creating his second work for the Metropolitan Museum of Art promenade, The Making of a Mountain,[14] in 1995, Counts directed and designed a series of performances and installations from 1996 to 1997 in multiple indoor and outdoor locations in Manhattan and in touring residencies in Thailand and Japan, gathering a growing circle of artistic collaborators along the way.
Counts and the company also produced Oh… A Fifty-Year Dart (a series of episodes that unfolded over the course of three months), Departure, Ark, and TO SEA: Another Mountain[17] at various locations, including Grand Central Terminal, the SoHo Arts Festival, and the Tunnel nightclub.
[21] Counts, Stern, and Diebes, joined resident artists Michael Anderson, Tom Fruin, and Jeff Sugg to create four large-scale performance installations and mount numerous exhibitions and off-site events over the following five years.
He descended a ladder with his hands, then led the audience up a ramp decorated with a frieze of tiny flames (a reference to the Great Fire of Rome) to the warehouse space above, where they encountered a series of episodes described in The New York Times as "a fun house for the senses… a cascade of images conjured by the conscious and subconscious, and with the question of how pictures framed in the mind's eye make their way into everything, from ancient myth to abstract paintings to commercial movies.
"[25] The audience was guided through multiple installations by intelligent and moving stage lights and Diebes’ through-composed electronic score: a living room whose back wall disappeared to reveal a pixie in a slowly receding forest, a tryst in a public bathroom mounted on wheels and swirling around the space, a family dinner at an ornate and extravagantly long table, a tartan-skirted schoolgirl emerging from the top of a wardrobe, and more.
[citation needed] Tilly Losch, produced later in 1998 and described by Counts as "a dream one might have had if falling asleep after watching Casablanca,"[26] took its inspiration from the eponymous shadow box sculpture by Joseph Cornell.
[27] The title of 1839 (1999) refers to the year photography was invented, and was conceived as a dream of Daguerre "in which a child, in the guise of Oedipus, wanders through a landscape peopled by narcissists in love with their own photographed images.
[28]" The landscape was a kinetic collage of multi-layered, allusive imagery with three-dimensional reproductions of artworks such as Manet’s Olympia, a large classical still life, and a cat from a Balthus painting interwoven with invented scenarios.
[31] In 2011, Director of New York City Opera (NYCO) George Steel invited Counts to direct and design a new production entitled Monodramas[32] at Lincoln Center.
[34] In 2016, Counts staged the world premiere of the seven-hour The Ouroboros Trilogy, a production by Beth Morrison Projects presented by Arts Emerson at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston, MA.
The work united three scores by Scott Wheeler (Naga), Zhou Long (the Pulitzer Prize-winning Madame White Snake), and Paola Prestini (Gilgamesh) under the umbrella of libretti written by a single author, Cerise Lim Jacobs.
In Yellow Arrow (2004), Counts collaborated with Christopher Allen, Brian House, and Jesse Shapins to create "Massively Authored Public Art" that was a forerunner of the geospatial web in its creation of a "deep map" of the world.
Initially with Stern and later with New York City gallerists including Mike Weiss, Counts co-organized a series of exhibitions from 1996 to 1999 that attracted visitors to the DUMBO shopfront gallery.
[39] In 2011, Counts created a series of twelve sculptures that took key motifs from Monodramas, the evening of operas for soprano and orchestra he was directing and designing at Lincoln Center.
[40] In 2016, Counts collaborated with Florida artist JEFRË and 3-Legged Dog on creating The Beacon and Code Wall,[41] a six-story hyperbolic convex-concave tower animated by dynamic video designs.
Counts has been a featured speaker at MIT’s Media Lab, Omnicom’s Global Summit for the Radiate Group, and on panels hosted by City College and The Rockefeller Foundation.
"[45] Counts created immersive environments in GAle GAtes et al.’s 40,000 square-foot warehouse space, which served as a laboratory in which he developed performance concepts over the company's five-year residency.
It’s also like cruising through a fun house at the carnival, but the creatures popping out of the darkness aren’t just screaming, they’re reciting oblique texts from classical literature, art criticism, Fellini movies, and Dada playlets.