I build encounters with ecological and technological volatility.
Too often we meet the unfamiliar with answers formed for other situations, and mistake these answers for insight. If we want to be answerable to what’s happening, we need encounters that our existing ideas cannot absorb — encounters that can exceed the people who design them as much as the people who enter them. The work is not after a position adequate to the volatility, but a relation to it that stays open.
Over twenty years this has taken form as residencies, festivals, national consultations, and multi-day encounters that place people inside artificial intelligence, ecological damage, and political uncertainty rather than in front of explanations of them.
The dominant responses to volatility — analysis, ethical frameworks, policy — treat understanding as a precondition for action. The work argues otherwise. The encounter does not precede understanding. It stands in its place.
The Work
Shipwreck 2024–2025 · Reykjavik, Montreal
Six Canadian artists brought ruins of possible futures to a former dairy barn outside Reykjavik. Six Icelandic artists were asked to make a home among them. No explanations were offered.
Please Don’t Understand This 2021 - 2022 · Dzaleka, Beijing, Cairo, Toronto
Artists in a Malawian refugee camp, a Beijing hutong, and a Cairo design community generated their own symbolic languages for AI — without being told what AI was. A test of how communities can describe algorithmic culture in their own symbols rather than through borrowed or imposed ones.
Material Culture Under Authoritarianism 2026 - in progress
Current research into the objects, records, and rituals people make under conditions of political closure. Developing as a book and through a record label partnership. Documentation grows with the project.
Notes to follow
Selected Writing
The Japanese words for space could change your view of the world · Quartz, 2018 · most-viewed article of the year
Intimacy and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Algorithmic Culture · Goethe-Institut, 2021
"Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaboration as Future Work Paradigms: A Case Study of the Banff Centre" · 2019 · Future of Education and Labor, Springer
"Centering Aesthetics in Community Development: Approaches from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity" · 2020 · Handbook of Community Development, Edward Elgar Publishing
Poor Footing · occasional writing on Substack
Books
Poetics of Synthetic Language
riso-printed anthology
GROUND
tabletop roleplaying game
sold out