Dear Friends,
It's been a rough year.
We've watched tech oligarchs cozy up to authoritarian leaders, cultural and scientific institutions dismantled, rising hostility toward anyone deemed "other," and AI pushed on us as inevitable – as if averaging the past could somehow generate the future.
In this era of increasing censorship and AI-generated slop flooding every channel, my belief in art as a force for awareness and change is beginning to feel naive. Maybe it always was.
And yet...
Moments like these are also an opportunity to reflect. Technology doesn't have to be inevitable (that sense of inevitability is itself part of the product being sold). I still believe there are other paths forward, and that art, even if it can't save us, offers space to imagine what they might look like.
This past year, I kept making work with AI and quantum computing – not to celebrate these technologies, but to probe their assumptions and expose what lies beneath the surface of "progress." From drawings that trace hidden stress patterns in AI conversations to images generated through quantum uncertainty, I keep returning to the question: what gets lost when we accept technology on its own terms?
I spent much of the year in Paris, and the distance helped – not just from the endless assault of real-time US news, but from the assumption that Silicon Valley's vision of the future is the only one available. It was a reminder that other relationships to technology, to time, and to daily life, still exist.
The year wore us down. But I still believe art has a role – shifting how we see the world, helping us question more. That's where cultural change begins. The future isn't something that happens to us. It's something we make.
Wishing you a new year of wonder, resistance, and possibility.
David,
