Image: Barbara Kasten, Construct A+A. 1984

These notes contain my media and writing. This space exists for sustained inquiry, a deliberate withdrawal from algorithmic feeds and the managed attention of platforms I cannot control.

Social media platforms fragment thinking into digestible but wholly incongruent pieces for algorithmic consumption. We know this. I created this space to reclaim extended thought and develop ideas without the gameplay of immediate engagement and trick language. While such a proclamation might serve as licence for self-absorption, I pledge to remain receptive to the seriously far-out and radically plausible: curious and electric.

The portfolios of images I share here reveal my patterns of interest. In much of my work, seeing comes before understanding. That seeing focuses often on planetary reality, which provides the backdrop for all possible futures. Every observation makes me a timekeeper of change, change that has existential consequence. I document what I see because signals are also symptoms, and reading these symptoms correctly shapes the many ways we imagine tomorrow.

This observational approach extends to understanding where I stand within complex and inscrutable systems, which precedes any useful prediction about where those systems might go (everything is THX-1138 now, baby!). I try to locate myself within these systems because position determines perspective. Alternative futures become navigation instruments rather than destinations. We can only move through uncertainty, never eliminate it.

Much of this exploration happens through responsive notes on reading, art, and media, particularly futures-oriented films. I am not trying to write a complete library, but trace how I interpret different visions of tomorrow emerging in culture. Art reveals collective anxieties, shadows, and ideals about change in ways that policy documents and academic papers cannot.

This space also holds journalism and reports, including reflections on circumnavigating Earth during the Cold War and rise of globalisation. The perspective gained from moving through contested landscapes informs how I read current lines of change and serves as something of an origin story for my interest in global flows. I discovered that interpretations begin to make different sense when you sit on them for forty years.

For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, I lived and worked around the US-Mexico border. Borders are often written about as laboratories for the future (double-meaning of frontier), and perhaps that notion fits. In my experience, a more interesting phenomenon is that they function as societal scrying mirrors, where media reflects and projects any story they might imagine about the same place. Before defining where and what a border is, the power of narrative becomes explicit. The same location can be treated simultaneously as a site of political or criminal technology, economic opportunity, humanitarian crisis, cultural confluence, and natural system, depending on who holds the lens.

Given that borders today are used to draw forward change from the complexities of movement and power, it becomes pleasant work to turn attention to more deliberate oracles. I have collected and am sharing archive images of temples, altars, and oracles: gestalts of a future perfect that prompt deliberate thinking about time and change. These structures reproduce territorial logics at smaller scales. I try not to distort their context or make defensive arguments about their meaning, but enjoy sharing interesting things that have not been widely published or published at all.

I write in British English except when I write in American English.

July 8, 2025

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If you are submerged in normal life, then your view will be normal. So we have to keep separate from normal life in order to be able to say something that is not known. - Gilbert & George