I hope you had an amazing New Year! I’m writing this from a scary windstorm that’s walloping L.A. at the moment, but even the growing mess of leaves and branches in my front yard can’t deter my excitement for 2025, which promises to be full of more art and psychic weirdness.
For starters, I just shot a short experimental film called Untranslatable, where I recorded myself telling an impassioned story in gibberish, then returned afterward to “translate” it into a cohesive narrative using subtitles.
Speaking gibberish without an internal narrative in mind feels really strange. Unlike a textual narrative that builds on the memory of what’s been said, gibberish builds on the memory of the spontaneous feelings you’ve surfaced in yourself out of nowhere.
Listening to the gibberish repeatedly later until a story emerges feels similar to how Surrealists employed automatic writing to plumb their unconscious minds for universal symbols and hidden meaning. It’s like listening to a foreign film whose language you don’t speak, but where you still try to make meaning out of a speaker’s raw human sounds, gestures, and tone.
Interpreting gibberish after-the-fact raises interesting questions: When does authorship truly occur? How does context (such as the addition of subtitles) change content? And, what role does the unconscious play in providing meaning, especially where a work was partially created unconsciously?
On the performance art front, I kicked off the new year by performing Alien Tuning Fork, a new piece that explores my past encounters with possible extraterrestrial intelligences. (Not only does it involve forks, I also discovered I can break a fork in half with my toes — how cool is that?!). I unveiled the new work at the 5x5x5 show at Art City, a killer art space in Ventura, CA that featured a bunch of fun performances for a standing-room-only audience that was positively on fire! You can check out Tuning Fork photos, and I hope to post some video of it soon. Special thanks to Ventura’s Steve Aguilar for producing the 5x5x5, and for his devastating piano work.
And, last but not least, in January ’25 I presented results again from my psychic experiment, this time at the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA), an organization dedicated to exploring the science, mystery, and utility of remote viewing. I was a little nervous presenting to luminaries in the remote viewing field (some had worked on the U.S. Government’s top secret Star Gate project in the 1970s & 1980s), but the audience was incredibly kind, excited by my research, and super supportive during the Q&A with a ton of great ideas for future research directions. What an amazing and humbling experience. Thank you for inspiring me, IRVA!
May your 2025 be magical! If you’re interested in watching Untranslatable or checking out some performance art (I hope to produce a show in L.A. this summer!) check back here! xoxo