Charles Lindsay is a conceptual artist-adventurer whose work synthesizes ideas about time, technology, eco-systems and semiotics. Lindsay creates immersive environments, sound installations, sculptures built from salvaged aerospace and bio-tech equipment.  These investigations coalesce in his evolving FIELD STATION installations. His other current projects include inter-active public artworks, rain forest conservation and the artists in residence program at the SETI Institute. 

For Lindsay, time is even more of an unknown unknown. When looking at his work, we experience a kind of space age nostalgia that isn’t nostalgic; an (un)certain future that isn’t futuristic and a gap where the present should be. Lindsay’s work layers time, confuses chronology and keeps us guessing at what we are looking at, how it’s communicating, and what kind of being made it happen.  

Denise Markonish, Curator, MassMoCA

OSA EARS is designed to provide real time high resolution sound and a cloud of species and climate change data from one of Earth’s most bio-diverse rain forests to anyone anywhere in the world. A networked array of microphones, web cams and sensor banks will expand over time to cover OSA Conservation’s 5000 acre wildlife corridor, from ground level to canopy top. Located on Costa Rica’s OSA peninsula OSA EARS will create a broad based platform for researchers and artists interested in habitat protection, soundscape ecology, remote sensing and bird song. It will serve as a home base for cutting edge field work, offering an opportunity to develop and adapt surveillance and sensor technologies for inter-disciplinary wildlife monitoring and protection. ECOTONE is the large scale art installation currently being developed in concert with OSA EARS. The ECOTONE will be modular, scalable and technologically breath-taking. Angel investors and visionary philanthropists welcome.

Consider the margins of our sensory capabilities and conceptual frontiers. What is Art to a synesthete, or to an alien looking in on our culture? What communications are we unaware of in the pheromonal territories, in the sub-sonic realms, in total darkness.  What are we missing? I'll get back to you as soon as I figure some things out ... in the mean time please maintain humor and stay in touch.

Why all the Gold? I'm interested in connections to deep time, in symbols and experiences that transcend narrow, culturally specific views of now. All the gold on Earth was created in stars that died before ours was born. Horseshoe crabs have been on Earth for 450 million years. Humpback whales appear to have language, our machines are learning and the stone age is closer than ever. 

Band of Fishing Buddies, preparing to fly into the upper Skeena River drainage, British Columbia, Canada - a perfect situation in which to consider what 'Canadian humor' actually means.... We have stone-age humor, art world humor, and more fringe varieties. I find myself exploring absurdity. Like music, humor transcends mere survival requirements. And like music, we see it in species other than humans. Ravens are great humorists, as are wolverines. Porpoises play. Bower Birds make art. The notion of human existence on this fragile world lost in space appears increasingly absurd, particularly in the USA. We humans are so intelligent, so promising, and such knuckleheads. For this artist, these questions approach the heart of the matter. 'Going Fishing' is a work description. Thesis pending. Thanks for looking.