Somehow, October is already here one third over, despite no one having consulted me. I’ve shared some pieces of what a difficult Summer I had on this platform; as I dust myself off and begin the work of sketching out the next few months, I’m challenging myself to not rush straight back to full-tilt production. Instead, I’m going light on shows and meandering this month. Some of that is heavier, but in balance with a season of funerals I am giving myself time to wander t...
2023-10-14 03:45:40 +0000 UTC
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Here now, finally on Wifi - a sample of Jeff Goodell's book. Some bleak to kick off your month!
2023-10-01 12:49:03 +0000 UTC
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This past summer I gave remarks at the wedding of some treasured friends. It was a beautiful ceremony, and came at a time when I'm thinking pretty deeply and heavily about the ways that "Love" is a term we all use but carry different beliefs for. It had me thinking about my "True Love Story" library I used to run in public spaces in NYC, where people wrote and exchanged stories about True Love and gave author interviews. Of those conversations, this one remains perhaps the most striking t...
2023-09-29 23:09:10 +0000 UTC
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If you like me had the misfortune of spending the Summer in Washington DC, you likely sweated a lake and found no relief. Even if your location was more fortunate, chances are good no matter where you are (in the Northern Hemisphere at least) you saw unexpected highs in your forecast. As I continue to think about what stories experience design can lend to the Climate Conversation, broadening my knowledge about the threats we face is helpful context, but the real mission is to...
2023-09-14 22:56:01 +0000 UTC
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Conversation is a commerce, and when we give speech we become a part of what we speak with.
- Chapter 4; The Bond.
The Gift by Lewis Hyde is a fruitbasket delivered to your door; full of wonderful and almost prophetic one liners like this, with fascinating meditations on capitalism and commerce, and an 80/20 split of cringeworthy and outdated / fascinating anthropology and ethnographies.
It is a...
2023-09-04 17:03:27 +0000 UTC
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Hey All,
As I close out a month in Washington DC working on Monument Lab's contribution to the Pulling Together exhibition, I'm replacing this month's Archive Highlight with a new test feature. I have many collaborators that I adore, and I'd love to occasionally introduce you to them and their work.
I'm very lucky to start with a creator I adore - Jessica Creane, who aside from being the co-creator of Fair Trade is founder of IKantKoan, a team of "thoughtful creativity scien...
2023-08-30 02:22:47 +0000 UTC
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Another difficult month in the books - I appreciate your patience and grace as I support loved ones in my personal life, and go all-hands-on-deck in DC. Thank you.
In Fair Trade (link), Jessica Creane and I invited participants to consider how they determine Value by bringing items from home for possible exchange. Often enough, we found that in the process of coming to know each o...
2023-08-18 12:07:16 +0000 UTC
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BEFORE YOU HIT PLAY - I've got an offer for you:
In 2020, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation launched the “Monuments Project,” a $250 million investment designed to “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces and ensure that future generations inherit a commemorative landscape that venerates and reflects the vast, rich complexity of the American story.” As part of that effort, the Mellon Foundation commissioned Monument Lab to review almost half million ...
2023-08-01 04:02:34 +0000 UTC
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Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio that cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.
While my work with Monument Lab this Summer will take me to the National Mall in DC for August and September, I first worked with them in our shared home base of Philadelphia, when their 2017 exhibition asked the question: “what...
2023-07-29 13:01:17 +0000 UTC
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First off, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who reached out with messages of support after my post last month. Starting in 2020, as we moved through many phases of pandemic, I was struck by how much empathy and humanity was extended to employees in the companies I worked for—mostly because there was suddenly an abundance of a kind of Grace I’d never rarely given before. As we moved from one phase to the next, I realized how important that Grace was to me, and I b...
2023-07-11 18:00:05 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
The more chronological amongst you may have noted that it is quite late in June for reading lists or any such updates.
Full transparency: it's been an unexpected and difficult few weeks, personally, so I'm taking a slow month on these reading lists and highlights to recover. In the coming months, I've got a lot that I'm excited to read with all of you, and updates on a big public art project I'm excited to be stepping into this summer.
However, for now, so...
2023-06-24 02:42:57 +0000 UTC
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This month, I featured Jenny Offill's phenomenal book "Weather." Take a listen for a sample !
2023-06-01 10:23:58 +0000 UTC
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All this talk in the news about AI and “datasets” has got me thinking about the way I relate to “Creative Data;” when I helped build a BFA at Tisch Open Arts, our conversations about Creative Research became a major force in shaping how I approach projects. Some of this data can be fairly straightforward; you can see the exhaustive “Pay Up” series for a glimpse at what I do with “hard numbers” on payment.
But in much of my work, I find myself collecting ...
2023-05-28 18:01:00 +0000 UTC
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Remember a few months ago when I said things were so hectic that I was re-reading Mary Oliver's collection of Essays for some peace?
Anyway, here's Wonderwall.
2023-05-27 16:50:05 +0000 UTC
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If you’re asking generally on the East Coast this week, then I’d say “pretty good.” But if you’re asking about Jenny Offil’s novel “Weather”—then boy oh boy do I have a reading list for you.
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“Weather”
Jenny Offill, 2021
Those of you in the old guard may remember this boo...
2023-05-11 02:50:10 +0000 UTC
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Hey there!
Things are all-hands-on-deck on the high-seas, with Undersigned's appearance at Overlook Film Festival barely behind us, and Fair Trade heading to the La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival at the end of this month! Madness!
Things being what ...
2023-04-13 22:33:47 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
Just dashing off a quick note of thanks for your patience - reading excerpts for last month and updates for this month will be arriving in a few days as I wind down the run of Undersigned in New Orleans. As the photo above clearly shows, it's been a grueling ordeal, and not at all a wonderful-joyous-strange-and-wild-ride-fueled-by-powdered-sugar.
Touring is everything I'd hoped and more than I'd expected; I appreciate your patience as I make sure to take i...
2023-04-03 18:58:39 +0000 UTC
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This is the fifth in a series of posts about my experiments in different payment Systems across my projects The Telelibrary, Fair Trade, and Undersigned).
If yo...
2023-03-16 21:00:01 +0000 UTC
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If you’ve been with the Patreon forever, you may remember that I had wanted to read this book a year and a half ago, but lost it for a while. Now that I’ve hands on it again, and since I’m once again staring down the barrel of a busy season (with Overlook almost here, and exciting updates for Fair Trade to come), I felt the need to ground again with a writer who embodies the best of a good walk in the woods*.
2023-03-06 14:43:19 +0000 UTC
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“Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” So begins the academic paper that inspired Annie Murphy Paul’s book (and will probably churn it’s way into being a piece of mine someday, being as it is so exceptionally on brand). As Murphy Paul summarizes:
“Clark and Chalmers initially focused their analysis on the way technology can extend the mind - a proposal that quickly made the leap from risibly preposterous to self-evidently obvious, once th...
2023-03-01 14:10:52 +0000 UTC
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This month I I had the lucky chance to catch my collaborator and friend Jacob Ford for a conversation, which he very kindly offered to record. As such, we’re gonna take a break from writing in the confines of my own small, cramped mind to jump into far-reaching conversation we shared about museums, curation, community, civic practice, designing the "space" of the Telelibrary, and birds.
Fair warning: It's 52 minutes, which is both far longer than any of us would hope and unbelievably...
2023-02-26 15:50:46 +0000 UTC
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“Get out of your head” is every acting teacher’s favorite shouted command (and a sure-fire way to trigger theater-school-trauma from any graduate). But Anna Murphy Paul has a much broader vision for what that means.
2023-02-10 20:15:31 +0000 UTC
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Shopping for some good tools and tricks in your creative practice? Well, there are quicker books than Twyla Tharp's "The Creative Habit," and there are more enjoyable books too — but as a center of a few Venn Diagrams, Twyla does alright, and we review a few choice excerpts here.
2023-02-01 03:40:56 +0000 UTC
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“To Put a Price on It”
This is part 4 in an ongoing series on the different ways people pay for my experiences, and the second half of two highlights about the pay-what-you-wish after-the-fact set up of the Telelibrary. If you're just starting now, you'll want to start at least with the first half, if not
2023-02-01 02:39:22 +0000 UTC
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As I continue to look critically at my creative practice in the ongoing Archive Highlight Series, I’m riding the wave of introspection with some reading to inform my general practice.
2023-01-06 21:19:56 +0000 UTC
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As some of you may have seen in the most recent Archive Highlight, I'm halfway through a review of the data on the payment structure for the Telelibrary. While I've mostly completed running the hard numbers, I think an equally important dataset to generate is User impressions.
This poll features a number of possible responses, including the option to add your own thoughts below in the comments. You ...
2023-01-04 22:23:05 +0000 UTC
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There’s a quote I’ve always liked, which goes something like; “if I had more time, I’d have written you a shorter letter.” Very much that spirit, today I bring you perhaps the longest reading excerpt yet, whose contents are overwhelming not reading excerpts at all but rather me unspooling on the topics of content warnings, invitations to experiences, and other design considerations. It’s all very “inside baseball” for making immersive content, so if you’re into that...
2023-01-02 04:21:11 +0000 UTC
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Pay Up - pt 3; “Pay If/As You Wish/Like/Feel”
This is the third in a series of posts about my experimental Payment Systems across my projects: The Telelibrary, Fair Trade, and Undersigned. If you haven’t already, I recommend...
2022-12-31 21:52:00 +0000 UTC
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Timing Note: If you're on the West Coast, please kindly inform everyone else that it is still in fact November, and I'm definitely not LATE or anything. If you're on the East Coast (or even East-er) ... go to sleep.
Yes, late in coming but seasonally just in time, we're reading an excerpt from Ross Gay's book Inciting Joy this month. I tried to keep it short, which is to say, it's as long if not longer than normal posts, but only after I physically restraine...
2022-12-01 05:09:00 +0000 UTC
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