VAST: Visiting Artist & Scholar Talks

The term “now casting” comes from meteorology. It's the report of current weather conditions based on computer modeling rather than direct observation or real-time reading of sensors in the field. It particularly revealing of our cultural moment: we live at a time when for any given action, predictive calculations are constantly occurring. A ubiquitous example is data mining and targeted advertising, but predictive analytics powered by Artificial Intelligence is deployed on all levels of our social structure, from policing and medicine to models of climate change. Within my practice and my use of Ai the generative aspect of this “casting” serves as an analogy for the vitality at play in the world around us. The spatiotemporal patterns in the work reflect ecological complexities and speak to the limits of a human-only frame of reference.

I grew up at the base of the Flat Irons in Boulder, Colorado, the child of geographers. On family hikes, my parents gave a telling of the landscape that made visible the radical upheavals that had created the mountainous spaces we were traversing. The landscape wasn't static for me, but a place full of striations, erratics, and hanging U-shaped valleys: evidence of spatiotemporal flows operating beyond the scope of daily human assumptions.