Starting in 2007, he began to create a series of interactive documentary projects such as The Whale Hunt, Balloons of Bhutan, and I Love Your Work — combining the digital and physical worlds by using algorithmic rule sets to govern data collection in real-life situations, much as his computer programs were designed to do online. These ritualistic works included the 2009 project, Today — a 443-day practice of taking a photo and writing a story each day.
Today evolved into Cowbird, a storytelling platform open to all, which ended up hosting nearly 100,000 stories from 25,000 authors in 200 countries — working together to build a public library of human experience — until the growing trend of Internet addiction prompted its closure in 2017. He further explored these dynamics in the essays Modern Medicine and Navigating Stuckness, the manifesto Data Will Help Us, and the project Network Effect.
In 2015, he began to use the embodied technology of ritual to alchemize old family patterns at High Acres Farm, his ancestral home in Vermont. He continued this work for seven years — exploring what he came to call Life Art through a series of twenty-one rituals and matching films — ultimately released in 2022 as the autobiographical opus In Fragments.
He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s evolving a new project called Sunlight — a collection of wisdom teachings through original artwork.
