How do we change as a culture, and how do we each individually take responsibility for the one piece of the solution that we are in charge of, and that is our own behavior?
My work is about the behaviors that we all engage in unconsciously on a collective level. And what I mean by that, it's the behaviors that we're in denial about and the ones that operate below the surface of our daily awareness. And as individuals, we all do these things, all the time, every day.
I'm just becoming more and more aware of this truly profound responsibility that we carry as individuals. And it's a responsibility not only to ourselves and to our families, but to the billions of people who still have to come in the future who will be dealing with our legacy.
I wasn't interested in politics. My attitude about it was, I can't make a difference no matter what I do. And the truth is, I don't even care enough to try.
I crave to be able to photograph the way a painter paints - in a loose, expressive way.
I find myself walking these lines. Like I might be an artist, but I also might be an activist. And I'm trying to be both in a way that honors both and doesn't stray too far into either.
I think there's a tremendous amount of unacknowledged hostility in American culture.
I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.
My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.
I'm not against shock and horror. In fact, I really belive in facing the dark realities of our time as the first step in coming out of denial. So we have to look into the darkness.
One culture I find fascinating to juxtapose against American culture is the culture of Germany. They've gone through a long process through their art, poetry, public discourse, their politics, of owning the fact of their complicity in what happened in World War II. It's still a topic of everyday conversation in Germany.
When I learned about this tragedy that's happening in Midway - you know, these birds whose stomachs are filled with handfuls of our waste - I just felt drawn there magnetically.
If you sit down among hundreds of thousands of albatrosses in a field, pretty soon you'll be completely surrounded by them, as they come walking up toward us and nibble on our shoelaces and just look right at us out of curiosity.
Activating is about changing people's perceptions of overlooked or invisible spaces. A building can become an archetype, invisible, like for a New Yorker, for example, the Statue of Liberty. You look at it, and it disappears into the thousands of times you've already seen it.
There's an axiom I live by: 'There is no art without politics.' You either choose to engage it, or you choose political apathy. This ties in with ideas around real-time performance and feedback.