ABOUT
Artist · Filmmaker · Exploration Geologist · Founder, SETI Institute Artist in Residence Program
Charles Lindsay’s work emerges from boundary conditions—states in which systems, histories, scales and forms of intelligence meet and alter one another.
His working life began in exploration geology, learning to read signals in rock during remote survey work in the Arctic. He later lived for several years among a Mentawai community on Siberut, Indonesia, learning the language and making the photographs that became Mentawai Shaman. That experience established a method: enter unfamiliar terrain, pay close attention, and allow its internal logic to reshape the work.
Lindsay invented CARBON, a camera-less imaging process that received a Guggenheim Fellowship and developed into a new visual language. He became the first Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute and founded its international Artist in Residence program with astronomer Jill Tarter. At NASA Ames he made work inside the world’s largest wind tunnel, in the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, and in the presence of the D-Wave Two quantum computer.
Across four decades, the practice has moved through geology, rainforest, ocean, animal communication, photography, sound, institutional laboratories, artificial intelligence, Zen and deep time. These are not separate territories. Together they form a sustained inquiry into how unfamiliar forms of intelligence might be recognized—and how art can become an instrument for that encounter.
His current project, PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING), is a traveling installation, book and film. It brings sculpture, spatial sound, custom electronics, AI-generated moving image, field research and speculative narrative into an evolving architecture. The work asks what happens when human and nonhuman intelligences begin to share the same perceptual field.
SELECTED CHRONOLOGY
CURRENT WORK
2024–present
PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING) — traveling installation, book and film in development. Heron Arts, San Francisco; Ryosokuin Zen Temple and Kura Monzen Gallery, Kyoto. European presentation forthcoming at Athens Zen Center, Greece, 2027.
2024
Alpha tester, OpenAI Sora — text-to-video experiments developed in relation to a lifelong practice of lucid dreaming and the unstable authorship of human–machine image making.
2014–present
CODE Humpback — developed with SETI astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, whose information analysis established evidence of syntax in humpback whale communication. Sculptural and audiovisual works concerning encrypted signals and interspecies communication.
2016
The Sound of a Quantum Computer Thinking — composed from recordings made at the NASA Ames Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
2017
Double Blind / Hongshan · Wind Tunnel — audio-perception experiments begun in the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames and presented at Today Art Museum, Beijing.
POSITIONS AND AFFILIATIONS
2010–present
Founder and Senior Advisor, SETI Institute Artist in Residence Program. Founding director, 2010–2020.
2017–2018
Artist, Bell Labs — Experiments in Art and Technology.
2018
Artist, Cornell University — Carbon Neutral program, New York.
Ongoing
Research and collaboration with Ryosokuin, a sub-temple of Kennin-ji, Kyoto.
AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS
2016
Fellow, Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art.
2015
Robert Rauschenberg Residency.
Imagine Science Films Artist in Residence.
2010
Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, for CARBON.
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS AND INSTALLATIONS
2027
PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING) — Athens Zen Center, Greece, forthcoming.
2024
PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING) — Heron Arts, San Francisco; Ryosokuin Zen Temple and Kura Monzen Gallery, Kyoto.
2019–2020
FIELD STATION 4 — Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University.
2018
Wind Tunnel — Suzhou Jinji Lake Art Museum, Suzhou, China.
2017
Hongshan · Wind Tunnel — Today Art Museum, Beijing.
FIELD STATION 3 — Akron Art Museum.
FIELD STATION 2 — Des Moines Art Center.
2016–2017
FIELD STATION 1 — MASS MoCA.
2014
CARBON IV — LED LAB, New York.
2012
CARBON-X — ISEA, New Mexico, with Eric Hanson and xRez Studio.
2011–2012
CARBON — Center for Photography at Woodstock, New York.
2009
CARBON — Dennos Museum Center, Michigan.
2000–2007
UPSTREAM — traveling museum exhibition.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS AND CURATORIAL WORK
2025
Seeing Being Seen: A Personal History of Photography — Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Portland; curated by Michelle Dunn Marsh.
2019
Beyond the Cradle: Envisioning a New Space Age — MIT Media Lab.
2018
Curator, Xcelerator — Beijing Times Art Museum.
2017
Garage Inventors — Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco.
Making Contact: SETI Artists in Residence — New Museum Los Gatos.
PUBLICATIONS
2019
Recipes for the Mind — poems. Terra Nova Press; distributed by MIT Press.
2016
CARBON — monograph. Minor Matters Books.
2007
Bad Lies — Little, Brown.
2005
Lost Balls — Bulfinch / Little, Brown; foreword by John Updike.
2004
Voices of the Land — photographs; text by Jamie Crelly Purinton; foreword by Michael Pollan. Chelsea Green.
2000
Upstream — Aperture; essay by Thomas McGuane.
1994
Turtle Islands — Takarajima Books; essays by Lyall Watson.
1992
Mentawai Shaman — Aperture.
COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston · Philadelphia Museum of Art · Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University · Hewlett-Packard Contemporary Art Collection
The SETI Artist in Residence Program archive is held by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.
SELECTED TALKS AND CONVENINGS
Burning Man AI Day · Edge of AI · Kyoto University of the Arts / TEDx KUA · Sónar+D, Barcelona · China Academy of Art, Hangzhou · Chronus Art Center, Shanghai · Rhodes House, Oxford · Moogfest · Gray Area Festival · 100 Year Starship Symposium · American Museum of Natural History · California Academy of Sciences · Stanford · USC · CalArts · SVA · Pratt · Swissnex · ideacity, Toronto · Hat Creek Radio Observatory
EDUCATION AND FIELD
Bachelor of Science in Geology, University of Western Ontario, 1983. Practiced as an exploration geologist.
Field research and extended residence in the Arctic, Indonesia, Costa Rica, Japan, Greece, Türkiye and Greenland.
Conversational Japanese, Indonesian and Mentawai.