True Art Is Always Pioneering

In The Art World Is Not Art I wrote about why I left: the hype engine, the gatekeeping, the transactional access. That essay was about integrity.

This one is about something I find more interesting, and in the long run more damaging. Not that the art world is corrupt — that argument is made. That art has become small.

Art is always whole. But today’s art, mostly, is not.

Alongside a general trend in humanity toward reductionistic science, I’d argue art has become very reductionistic. It works now like entrepreneurship, where the first thing you’re told is to find a niche. Artists frequently have to find a niche and then stay inside it, commercially. A certain style, a certain medium — the medium almost defines them, instead of them undefining the medium.

There have always been artists who worked across every material they could reach. But mostly it’s the recognizable style that has to be kept, and that makes it very hard to change. Changing costs you the collectors who bought the last thing. Consistency is a financial instrument.

György Kepes is the example I keep returning to, because he didn’t argue that art and science should meet — he built the room. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT put artists inside a technical institute as a standing arrangement, not a visit.¹ That is a structural answer, and it is rarer now than it was in 1967.

I tried the interdisciplinary thing seriously, with enough backing to begin and not enough to continue.

In 2014, my proposal for Metaverses was selected through Third Culture Projects, a collaboration between the University of Oregon and the Oregon Arts Commission for the Robert and Beverly Lewis Integrative Science Building. I initiated the proposal, conceived the project, led its development, and carried it through. The research developed through Seecular and into mYndful: an immersive environment connecting heart-rate and respiration sensing to virtual reality so that aspects of the experience could change with the participant’s physiology. The human being stayed at the centre.

From 2014 to 2016, I was a visiting scholar at the Benjamín Alemán Laboratory for Quantum and Nanoscale Physics and a visiting artist with the Institute of Neuroscience in the Robert and Beverly Lewis Integrative Science Building. Working with collaborators at the University of Oregon, the University of Michigan and Virginia Tech, the collaborations crossed neuroscience, psychology, quantum and nanoscale physics, biology, computer science, sound, and art. I was not visiting one discipline and borrowing the vocabulary of another. I was moving between the laboratories, the data, the participants, the interfaces, and the public presentation.

The project received approximately $14,000 in grant funding across more than two years. That money mattered. It opened doors, paid for real work, and made the first experiments possible. It was also very little for a program that involved human-subject studies, EEG and fMRI access, software and VR development, scientific collaborators, public presentations, and travel. Some conference travel was supported through NSF-related travel grants; much of the rest I paid myself.

The first phase of Metaverses asked whether physiological and neural signals could help us understand how different people respond to visual environments. The 2016 AAAI paper, which I lead-authored,² reports 44 participants, more than 30,000 image ratings, and eight weeks of twice-weekly sessions. Its preliminary analysis associated images rated more highly with increased frontal theta. This was exploratory evidence, not a universal decoder of taste, emotion, or truth.

During the winter of 2014–15, as Edward Vogel prepared to move his visual-cognition laboratory from Oregon to the University of Chicago, laboratory space became available after hours and on weekends. I used that opening. Some studies were fruitful; others were not. That is research. I explored whether two people perceiving at the same time might show measurable synchrony. I also worked with a graduate researcher from Vogel’s lab on a small randomized EEG exploration in which an experienced meditator repeatedly changed between meditation conditions.

I remember the conditions as including mantra meditation, breath-focused practice, body scan, and neutral rest. The short published proceedings paper specifically records open-awareness and body-scan observations. That distinction matters: my memory can add context, but it should not rewrite the record. The researcher began skeptical that the techniques would produce distinguishable neural patterns. The preliminary EEG traces were different enough to justify a next question.

That question led to work with the influential attention researcher Michael Posner on a within-person fMRI comparison. The early observations suggested that different contemplative techniques might recruit different networks. Again: promising preliminary data, not a completed clinical study and not a claim that one technique was superior. What interested me was the possibility of personalization. If two practices are not neurally interchangeable, why should every interface, meditation tool, or therapeutic technology behave as if one method fits everybody?

Through the conference community, I also met MRI physicist Ray F. Lee, then at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. He invited me to Princeton for exploratory MRI work. I participated as an experienced meditator, and the resulting images showed a pronounced lateralized pattern that we found intriguing. A screenshot cannot establish that I intentionally moved blood flow into one half of my brain, and this observation was not published as a validated result. It was a reason to continue asking, under better controls and with adequate funding.

At Oregon, I also worked with the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization in Oregon (CAMCOR), primarily housed in the underground Lorry I. Lokey Laboratories. Its electron microscopes made structures visible across micro- and nanoscale dimensions. I brought some of that nanoscale imagery into mYndful’s Nanoscape, translating a scientific image into a navigable VR environment.

This was not decoration placed on top of science. The movement ran both ways: laboratory imaging became spatial experience, while heart-rate and breathing signals could alter the conditions of that experience. The interface did not claim to know what a person felt. It offered a feedback relationship that the participant could perceive and explore.

We staged photographs of a participant using the VR and heart-rate setup inside the Lewis building to show how the work might be encountered there. The proposed installation was never installed. That absence is part of the history. The research generated data, prototypes, images, public presentations, collaborators, and a Best Presentation Award at AAAI 2016, yet the place for which the work had been proposed did not ultimately present it as a continuing installation.

The work moved through communities that were unusually open to questions crossing art, consciousness, computation, and embodiment. The one peer-reviewed paper of this period is the 2016 AAAI Spring Symposium paper at Stanford. The remainder were conference presentations: The Science of Consciousness 2015 in Helsinki and 2016 in Tucson (supporting records are collected on the Metaverses / Seecular research page), the 2016 UCSB Art, Design & Knowledge conference, and the 2015 a2ru National Conference (official programme, PDF). I also presented the work at Boston University, New Mexico Tech, Transformative Technology Conference in San Francisco, and the 2015 Constraints conference at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

At Science and Nonduality (SAND), I found a community willing to place scientific inquiry, contemplative experience, and nonduality in the same room. I met founders Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo and presented in the SAND community in 2016 and 2017. I also met cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, whose Gödel, Escher, Bach made self-reference, analogy, mind, music, art, and artificial intelligence feel like parts of one living question rather than separate departments. These encounters were not endorsements of my work. They were part of the intellectual ecosystem that kept it moving.

Alongside the laboratory work, I continued making and showing art. In 2015, the University of Oregon’s Mills International Center included my Up…Up… Up…Up… photographs in The Global Backdrop, an exhibition on industrial development and changing landscapes. In New York, mYndful was demonstrated during Jamaica Flux in 2016 and appeared with mUltiverseS in Disarming Geometries at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs in Long Island City in 2017. mYndful also holds a Public Art Archive record. The public settings mattered: a biofeedback environment only becomes legible when someone can enter it.

The official budget does not describe the actual economy of the project. To make the grant last, I slept on researchers’ couches near campus. I bought an inexpensive sailboat near Portland for roughly two or three thousand dollars, lived aboard with low marina costs, and commuted between Portland and Eugene by bus. I loved being on the water. It was not only deprivation. But the arrangement was also how I could afford to keep doing the work.

In Portland in the winter of 2015, after encountering research around the Wim Hof Method, I began training myself in breathing and cold exposure. I wanted to understand interoception and physiological self-regulation in my own body, not only through a sensor readout. It also helped me finally move beyond anxiety and depression, and that change has lasted. I saved money by buying almost no winter clothing. Later in New York, colleagues at ThoughtWorks saw me arrive in sandals and a T-shirt through winter. In 2016, I also brought Wim Hof to New York.

Brooklyn Yoga Club workshop, October 2016 — video

I continued living on a sailboat in New York, rent-free for years on Newtown Creek, with a beautiful view of the New York skyline—including throughout my ThoughtWorks Arts residency. The simplicity gave me time. It also shows what artists sometimes absorb privately when institutions praise experimentation but do not finance the conditions that sustain it.

In the winter of 2017, the ThoughtWorks Arts residency gave part of this lineage another home. Biofields connected heart-rate and breath sensors to immersive environments through an open-source framework built with VR designer and technologist Lewey Geselowitz, using volumetric and interval-arithmetic simulations that responded to physiological signals. The work continued in March 2018 as AWERE / Breathing Fields at Harvestworks and SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and later into SEAing Breath, Breathing.ai, and my work on somatic and bioadaptive AI.

The technology changed. The central question did not: can a system respond to a person without reducing that person to a score? Can biofeedback remain consensual, legible, reversible, and private? Can personalization support agency instead of extracting attention? Those are still research questions, not solved promises.

What more could I have done?

There was real support: the initial University of Oregon and Oregon Arts Commission funding, laboratory access, generous collaborators, occasional travel assistance, public venues, and later ThoughtWorks. I am grateful for it. What did not arrive was sustained institutional funding, a permanent or continuing installation at Oregon, or the long research runway needed to reproduce and publish the most promising EEG and fMRI observations.

I also experienced what felt like favoritism—and at times nepotism—in how opportunities and support were distributed. I cannot independently document those internal decisions here, so I name this as my experience rather than as a proven institutional finding. The point is not to turn an unfinished research program into an accusation. It is to ask why so much demonstrated work—across art, neuroscience, physics, biology, psychology, and computer science—was allowed to stop at the prototype and presentation stage.

The answer matters beyond my own history. Bioadaptive and somatic technologies are now becoming normal. If they are developed only by systems optimized for scale, surveillance, or generalized averages, they will repeat the same reductionism I was trying to resist. The unrealized potential of this work is not that a machine could finally tell us who we are. It is that carefully designed, consent-based interfaces might help different people notice which practices, environments, and rhythms support them—without pretending that one signal, one meditation, or one model fits everyone.

So why would art restrict itself almost entirely to a handful of externally oriented senses, and overwhelmingly to one?

Visuals are spectacular, obviously, and there’s a real biological reason visual art lands so fast. The brain extracts the gist of a scene almost immediately — Thorpe, Fize and Marlot showed in 1996 that category-sensitive neural activity for complex natural images appears roughly 150 milliseconds after the image arrives, and much of that first pass is automatic and feed-forward.³

But speed is not depth. A field that optimizes for the fastest channel into a person, and then optimizes that channel for auction legibility, ends up making work that photographs well, catalogues cleanly and resells easily — and does very little else.

This is also why I don’t accept the framing that my patents and interfaces sit at some “intersection of art and technology,” as though two separate things were being introduced to each other. It’s one practice. Building interfaces that respond to breath and physiological state is the same question I was asking in galleries: how does a body actually perceive, and what happens if you address more of it than the eye?

The work also opened a larger question for me: how limited are we by the senses and interfaces we already privilege, and how expansive could we become? I continue that inquiry in “How Expansive Could Being Alive Be?”—from interoception and magnetoreception to technologies that might help us rediscover, translate, and extend perception with care.

I stay optimistic, and I want to be concrete about it rather than vague.

Art–science collaboration is still tiny next to the commercial art economy, and it is frequently underfunded and badly held. But serious programs exist and are running right now:

• Arts at CERN — since the first residency in 2012, more than 250 artists have worked inside a laboratory of over 17,000 scientists, engineers and staff. Collide, Connect and Resonance are all active into 2026, and the programme won the European Commission’s S+T+ARTS Grand Prize for Innovative Collaboration.^4,5
• ANAT Synapse (Australia) — since 2004, collaborations between more than 100 artists and researchers placed inside Australian research organisations. The 2026 resident, Elissa Goodrich, is working with a fluid dynamics team at Swinburne on bubble clouds and sound.⁶
• Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva — art and science residency tracks run with Campus Biotech Geneva, the University of Geneva and EPFL.
• S+T+ARTS — the European Commission’s standing initiative for science, technology and the arts.
• In June 2026, a NASA Decadal Astrobiology white paper, Collaborating With Artists in the Search for Life, argued that art–science collaboration beyond outreach unlocks ways of seeing that scientific practice alone doesn’t reach — citing Robert Irwin’s role in the 1970 NASA Habitability Symposium and Carl Sagan’s working method — and recommended that research grants carry dedicated budget and space for artists.⁷

That last recommendation is the one that matters, because it names the actual problem. Not whether artists are welcome in a lab. Whether there is a line in the budget.

I didn’t leave because I couldn’t get in. I left because getting in meant agreeing that the price is the work, and that the eye is the audience.

I kept making things. I went into labs, into code, into breath, because that’s where the questions actually led. I don’t think that’s a departure from art. I think it’s what artists did before we agreed to become a product category.

Art is always whole. The art world is what isn’t.