Hello all,
Welcome to my first newsletter! This time around, I’m summarizing a few years of projects, premieres, and creative development. Down the line, I hope to share more sketches, visions, curiosities, process.
For those who are newer to my practice — I work across immersive, literary, and conceptual art, and often in close collaboration with scientists. I enjoy connecting scientific inquiry to aesthetic, social, and philosophical questions and creating opportunities for audiences to discover and play. I hope my audiences experience something in my work that feels both totally new and utterly familiar, as if it already existed in the most elemental places of human wonder and compassion, like a glimmering world they’ve been to but perhaps forgotten.
And on that note, here’s an update on my artistic life from the last few years.
The Gift (premiered 2022, currently on tour)
The Gift began with a simple experiment in game-making on a hillside in Colorado Springs in 2018. Over many years of co-creation with Dr. Natalie Gosnell and Dr. Andrew Kircher, we landed on an immersive installation that we premiered last December at New York Public Library (images below), in partnership with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The work premiered in English, Spanish, and descriptive audio, featuring a score by Tina Hanaé-Miller and excerpted paintings by Amy Myers.
Briefly, The Gift is an immersive installation that animates contemporary astrophysics research and opens up metaphorical space for grief, care, and renewal. The work tells the story of two stars that are so close to one another yet so far from us that they appear as a single point of light in the sky. Their fates are intertwined; one star, at the end of its life, transfers its material to the companion, inciting the companion to burn faster and to appear—for a moment—younger, brighter, bluer.
The Gift was most recently at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs and has many shows ahead, including as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST Art festival in Los Angeles in ‘24-25.
How to Get to the River (premiered 2022)
How to Get to the River began with a different central question than The Gift, but very much a shared spirit. Our core artistic team — myself, Pete Angevine, Whit MacLaughlin — received a major grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to collaborate with the Academy of Natural Sciences and develop an exhibit that would animate the institution’s core research consideration: water.
Our experience — How to Get to the River — traversed over 5 city blocks from the Academy to the Schuylkill River. Along the way, participants followed visual cues, trail blazes, embedded sound experiences and other surprising moments that treat this urban watershed as a work of art. They became attuned to the evidence of water flow as it is imprinted on our urban landscape, noticing how it is channeled to the ground, courses across sloped roofs, gushes through rain gutters and splashes into underground storm drains. A serpentine clarinet fugue performed by British composer Shabaka Hutchings accompanied the journey. You can watch a video documenting the work here.
Tracing Lace (premiered 2022)
Tracing Lace was a collection of audio stories I created in partnership with Bard Graduate Center and fellow artist James Harrison Monaco as part of their Threads of Power exhibition on lacecraft. Accessed by RFID technology via participants’ phones, each story refracts the core research considerations of this exhibition in unique and unexpected ways. You can listen to all of the stories here.
Undisciplined (on its way)
I’ve been working with my astrophysicist collaborator Dr. Natalie Gosnell since 2018, and every time we talk about our collaboration publicly, other artists and scientists ask us how they too can develop an artist-scientist collaboration that is built on sustained exchange, mutual transformation, and exploration of novel trans-disciplinary research and creative activities. Now, we are writing a book to explore this very question — Undisciplined: Radical Strategies for Growing Artist-Scientist Collaborations, which is under contract with University of California Press for a 2027 publication.
Natalie and I made a lot of headway on our book this summer at the wild and wonderful Leonardo@Djerassi artist-scientist residency. There’s us in the photo above, enjoying sunshine and the gift of time.
Rogue Objects (on its way)
Since 2017, I’ve been artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History. And since that time, I’ve been slowly building the intellectual grounding for this work. Merging cutting-edge astrophysics with techniques of arthouse film, contemporary animation, and live performance, Rogue Objects is an uplifting, immersive experience for dome cinema that invites us to approach darkness with curiosity and wonder, without fear. It’s being produced by Alysa Nahmias (recently, Wildcat on Amazon Prime) and Alyssa Simmons (recently, Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower opera). I’ll share updates as this project develops!
Other fellowships, happenings, news
In 2021 I was named a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction.
In 2021-2022 I was a Sundance Art of Practice fellow alongside 67 other interdisciplinary artists.
In 2022, I was a UCross Foundation resident artist.
I gave a talk in the spring at Amherst College about my interdisciplinary art-science practice as a guest of my colleague Daniella Bardalez-Gagliuffi in the Physics department.
This year (‘23-24), I’m the Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, where I’m continuing some long-term investigations in residence with the Physics and Electrical Engineering departments.
This fall, I enjoyed some residency time at La Baldi, Camargo Foundation, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I finished a novel that involves outer space, friendship, and the Pacific Ocean.
In January, I’ll kick off the new year rebooting an older AR performance work Heisenberg at the Worlds in Play conference at ASU.
If we haven’t been in touch in a while, and you want to catch up, please do write back to me. I’d love to know what you’re up to as well.