PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING)
A traveling installation, book and film built across San Francisco, Kyoto, Athens and the deep-time landscapes of Anatolia. Part laboratory, part observatory, part improbable machine, it asks how we might recognize intelligence that did not evolve in our image.
Sculpture, spatial sound, moving image, custom instruments and found technologies create an architecture for attention. FIELD STATION, SE VENDE and the accumulated fieldwork form part of this evolving system—absorbed, recombined and sent forward.
PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING) began with an introduction to a Zen monk at an ancient temple in Kyoto. It was March 2020, on the day he was closing his 660 year old temple to the public because of the pandemic. He asked why we had been introduced. I answered with three questions: Can AI become sentient? If sentient, can AI become conscious? If conscious, can AI become enlightened?
He paused. I may have blown his mind.
He invited me to spend time at the temple and, when I was ready, to create an exhibition there. Ten days later, I had a lucid dream in which a yellow parking meter—of a type ubiquitous throughout Japan—appeared in a Zen garden. In the dream, all 40,000 such meters had become self-aware, networked, and had begun pranking commuters. That image became the generative framework for the exhibition and much of what followed. What, after all, is a parking meter but a device selling time and space. The raked gravel of a Zen garden signifies the sea of consciousness.
The exhibition opened four years later, after one of the most prolific periods of my creative life, based in Kyoto. My ‘consciousness research’ then moved from Kyoto to San Francisco, where investigations as an early Sora AI alpha tester brought another intelligence into the process. After the SF Heron Arts and Kyoto Ryosoku-in Temple shows, an invitation followed from the new Athens Zen Center, where PF(E) will next appear, opening September 2027. Suddenly ancient Greek culture, and the implications of psychedelic research related to the Eleusinian Mysteries, required my attention. In between all this, Göbekli Tepe summoned me. Humanity’s oldest known temple complex. I went. YARA appeared, as did an extraordinary antique carpet filled with the unmistakable forms of 192 psilocybin mushrooms—and a narrative overlay that became the screenplay for the PF(E) film. Incredible.
As I write this, I have just returned from my third Burning Man, in a state of awe, still impressed by art encountered through high wind and sandstorms. PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING) continues to evolve through lucid dreams, charged locations and improbable meetings. I remain astonished by what becomes possible when one is attentive without being overly programmed—open to signals, coincidences and conditions that cannot be planned in advance.
This is the research. It circles back to the questions I posed in Kyoto: consciousness, perceived reality, and how we might recognize intelligence when it arrives in an unfamiliar form. It is a privilege to work this way. Who knows what’s next? Welcome to my life.
