Doing nothing, finding everything.

There is an artist’s version of writer’s block, and I experienced it for the first time in 2016. For years, I’d been making work about infrastructure and the built environment while also teaching digital art at Stanford. But the end of that year brought me to a standstill.

First, there was the US presidential election, which left me and everyone I knew reeling. Not more than a month later, in December, a catastrophic fire broke out during an event at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland (where I’m based), claiming the lives of 36 people. Many of them were artists, and several of them were friends of friends. In my capacity as an artist, I felt unable to do or make