He studied painting and drawing at Deerfield Academy, computer science and photography at Princeton University, interaction design at Fabrica, and shamanism with The Power Path.
His initial work with data visualization helped to establish that burgeoning field in the early 2000s through pioneering projects like We Feel Fine, I Want You To Want Me, Yahoo Time Capsule, 10x10, and Wordcount.
Starting in 2007, he began to make a series of hybrid documentary projects such as The Whale Hunt, I Love Your Work, and Balloons of Bhutan — combining the sensibilities of the digital and physical worlds by applying rigorous rule sets to govern the collection of data in real-life situations, much as his computer programs were designed to do online. These ritualistic experiments led to a 443-day practice of taking a photo each day and posting it online each night before going to sleep, forming the 2009 project Today.
Today evolved into Cowbird, a storytelling platform open to all, which ended up amassing nearly 100,000 stories from 25,000 authors in 200 countries. The Cowbird community was active from 2011–2017, working together to build a public library of human experience, until growing dynamics around Internet addiction prompted its closure — dynamics he explored in the 2012 series Modern Medicine, the 2013 manifesto Data Will Help Us, the 2014 essay Navigating Stuckness, and the 2015 project Network Effect.
In late 2015, around the time of his mother’s passing, he began to use the embodied technology of ritual to alchemize old family patterns at High Acres Farm, her ancestral home and land in Vermont. He continued this practice for the next seven years, exploring what he came to call Life Art through a series of twenty-one radical rituals and matching films, collectively released in 2022 as the autobiographical opus In Fragments.
In 2023, he relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s working to create an interactive atlas of new and ancient wisdom called Sunlight.
His works have been featured by TED, MoMA, National Geographic, the BBC, The New York Times, The World Economic Forum, AIGA, IDFA, Sundance, and in museums around the world.
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