I'm going to start with a super broad question: tell me about ‘pataphysics. What is it? Why are you interested in it?

The definitions differ depending on who you ask. The one I like to lead with is, “the science of imaginary solutions.”

It’s the science of exceptions, and the specific as opposed to the general. Looking at science, the humanities, and all these different ways knowledge gets produced and codified. The rules we live by — on the scale of physics, but also on a societal level, on a governmental level, on a semiotic level within our own personal understandings of the world. ‘Pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics, but not necessarily in the way “meta” is above regular — it just is in some direction.

It's a lot about taking these ‘pataphysical conceits — “What if?” “Setting out from a world of perfect entropy, where anything is technically possible, what happens?” — trying to generate different worldviews from them, and then take them to their logical conclusions, whatever they may be.

How does that play through in your recent work? And how has it developed over time?

It was something that I was attracted to early in my artistic career because of the language around it. I spent a long time being really interested in pseudo-scientific language and buzzwords — these things which signify a lot and nothing at the same time. Looking at scientific language, academic language, corporate language like “synergy.”

My dad went to a conference once called “Contagious Synergy,” and I’ve never stopped making fun of him for it.

Honestly, synergy is an idea I love. It originated from Buckminster Fuller, who was the first thinker I really connected with. But now it’s just a buzzword. I almost think of it as a button that releases dopamine as opposed to actually doing anything.

This book by Christian Bök called ‘Pataphysics: The Poetry of an Imaginary Science, which I kind of always have sitting with me, is what really brought ‘pataphysics from a surface-level part of my work to a deeper part. Basically, the book invents a ‘pataphysical system to explain ‘pataphysics, which is as arbitrary as it is productive. It refers a lot to Duchamp’s bachelor machines, which are these non-functional, impossible machines that, when put to action, destroy themselves. And I feel like that has worked its way into my work in a number of ways, where I use the language of academia to create knowledge which, when interrogated, both creates and destroys reality and itself — undermining its own legitimacy, while also creating a new a worldview.

Can we talk about that in the context of your recent work? Which is to say, what have you been working on in Wassaic?

I’ve been going back to some of my artistic roots.

For the record, you’re wearing overalls right now — perfect for back-to-your-roots work.

Yeah, I’m from Nashville, Tennessee, gotta wear my overalls.

But I’ve been juggling a number of projects. I've been planning the second round of the Virginia Experiment, which is a big project I did last summer — and hopefully will do every summer until the end of time — with my creative partner Patton Small, under our theatre company, Experience Cult Research Group.

That's been taking a lot of time, but I’ve also been trying to get out of the really conceptual zone and just make stuff. I've been working on collage, ceramics, watercolors, doing a number of small video projects, slowly developing a project I started this past year in school — seeing what I can do with whatever material is produced by rearranging and putting things in different contexts.

You’re also currently at CalArts doing an experimental film MFA. But the works I'm looking at here in your studio are drawings — I don't think they're screens of an experimental film. Can you talk about how those things interact in your practice? That you're an animator who’s also thinking about drawing, while also bringing in these broader ‘pataphysical ideas.

Yeah, I'm going into my second year at CalArts. One thing that I like about that program is that, while it is animation-based, it looks at a much broader field. Animation is a word which means “to give life to” or “to bring alive.” I think about it in terms of animating the world, or giving life and meaning to things by creating these systems — which are kind of machines that make meaning.

In the overarching project I’m doing, Periproxology, I made a CG film that kind of functions as an essay film. A lot of what I've been focusing on in the film world is essay films as a way to, once again, look at the authority and language of academic dialogue. An essay in general is this first-person form with a truth claim, and I’m looking at the ways that I can take that weird place between the nonfictional and personal and generate new knowledge. CG, for me, is really nice for that. It takes less time than drawing every frame, but also has this uncanny quality. You can find ways to really rub the real and the fake against each other. I try to make that happen with the academic world, too — having citations and making logical claims that could exist in a real essay, but that are sort of nonsense when you look at them really closely.

I mean, I feel like in the last couple months photorealistic CG has sort of reached its logical conclusion. Like, I'm sure you've tracked how people responded to The Lion King. CG has lost that weirdness, that deliberate artificiality. I don't know what the question is there.

Here it is: how do you think of your animation in the context of a world where, if you wanted to, you could make your animation photorealistic? Why do you choose to do it the way you do, other than just, “I don’t have a full team!”

Yeah, I mean, even if I had the resources and the knowledge I think I’d only want to dip into that. Because it’s scary. You have Disney on one hand making The Lion King, but on the other you have deepfakes that try to trick you in a malicious way.

And, I don't know, I think fully staying in the realistic world doesn't do anything constructive. Because I think, on a base level, what I'm trying to do with my art is point out the constructedness of the whole world around you. I feel like if you fully lean into hyperreal CG, it just becomes a spectacle to some extent. I mean, it depends on what you're trying to say, so I don't want to guard myself against ever using fully realistic CG — but, for me, hiding the construction feels ingenuine and mean-spirited more than anything. There's this really great blog that used to be run called #HYPERREALCG. It was these two animators who would just take stock photos and post them, claiming they were hyper-realistic CG. And occasionally they’d slip in one that was actually CG.

But there’s also the “so what?” You can 3D print whatever you animate and have a real object that is an exact replica of the fake one you made. In some ways, those boundaries no longer mean enough to want to sit fully on one side of them.

I want to return to the Experience Cult Research Group. What is it? How did it start?

It started with a project that me and Patton were working on for a class [in undergrad], where we had to use technology in some sort of performance. We had been collaborators and friends for four years beforehand, but it was our first real project together. It was called Synesthetic Feedback Loop. It was just basically two days of really intense coding in Isadora and not sleeping — creating this weird series of cameras and microphones that would change the environment based on the way people performed in it.

At the same time, we were researching paratheater. Which we both found really interesting — him from a theater standpoint, and me from a performance art standpoint. Paratheater is basically the end result of this line of inquiry from Jerzy Grotowski about collapsing the audience-performer relationship by using set, bringing the audience on-stage, or having [the performance] not be on a stage but in the audience. Eventually the experience of performing became the art piece. A lot of it was towards this idea of authenticity. I don't know how much I believe in that, but I do believe there is something that can happen when you experience just being alive as an artwork.

That's come together in what we call a “research group.” For us, it’s just a way to facilitate a bunch of different ideas we have in terms of performance and art. But The Virginia Experiment is the crown jewel of Experience Cult Research Group, and what makes us a cult. We try to facilitate these heightened experiences through ritual, ceremony, improvised movement, vocal work — leading people into this rabbit hole where the life-art boundary totally collapses. We think a lot about active culture, how we form a small community that develops its own culture that gets imprinted on everyone there. Almost like a viral culture that then, we're hoping, infects the world with these ways of experiencing and these ways of interacting with other people with authenticity or presence.

What does that look like, logistically? Are you camping? Or do you have spaces dedicated to the experiment? Take me through a day.

Recently we’ve been doing it on this farm in Raphine, Virginia. They've been 10-day long intensives, and pretty much every day functions with three portions: a morning session where we do physical work and presence training; an afternoon session where we explore more specific techniques like clowning, viewpoints, and deep listening; and a bigger ceremonial session in the evening, which will either be a large, structured performance that people improvise within. Each one of those days lined up next to each other builds a larger arc of the project.

Last year was all about group culture and the language that develops within a specific group of people. So we did a series of things: naming ceremonies, baptisms, giving people vestments, big dining ceremonies where we give speeches. It's about easing people into being able to do things which seem absurd, but which, within this new context, just become a normal part of being alive and not part of doing art. Pushing that boundary further and further.

Has being in Wassaic affected how you think of building those group cultures? Because you've been here for several months, with several different groups of residents.

It really has just reaffirmed, more than anything, the way your reality is formed by the people you're around. Like, what I do on a day-to-day basis and the way I act is completely different between these groups of people. Not completely, but —

I mean, I think that “completely” isn’t really an overstatement. I think about that in my own life as well. Like, who I am totally depends on the quote-unquote vibe of the room is. Which we don't really have a language for beyond “the vibe.”

Which is a great word, but it almost means nothing at the same time. And I don't think it’s a bad thing to be able to morph to fit different contexts, but being able to be mindful and understand how you're changing is important. I mean, there are certain places where I do change into a person I don't really like. But I've been able to realize that more and more and, by acting differently, change how other people act. Because there is no set “vibe” of a place. By just conforming to it, you're reinforcing what it is — but if you can come in from an angle, it can kind of shift the geometry of the environment. I think ultimately that is the hope of my art practice: that I'll be able to enter more spaces obliquely and change the space, in and out of an art context.

You just mentioned the geometry of space. You’ve also done a lot of contact improv in the past: how does thinking about that relationship between bodies and physical space play out in your visual work? And vice versa?

For me, dance is a lot about being a body in space — understanding that I participate in space and interact with it in a way which is not detached. I think that the mind-body separation disappears when you come to understand your physical relation to your environment as totally attached to your perception. Not just through seeing and hearing — which are even physical in a certain way — but it really is a tactile world. My looking at you is looking at a body that I could reach out and touch. The interplay of bodies and the interplay of ideas are more or less the same thing to me, and dance is a connector — where the two worlds of the physical and the mental come to touch and eventually collapse.

So you don't think of dance as something that's tertiary to your practice. It doesn’t just support the visual art — it's part of the same core of your practice.

Yeah. I mean, I would almost think of my visual art more as under the umbrella of dance. Like, when I make objects, I mean for them to be real things in the environment, and that's where they gain their value — that they’re physical and embodied.

A lot of your work de-familiarizes the body in very interesting ways, too. Even just the sketch animations that you post on Instagram. They're fun and funny, but they also make you think about the ways in which bodies operate in the world.

And I think the idea of boundaries has become a theme in a lot of my work — be it the mind–body boundary, the art-not art boundary, the truth-fiction boundary. Everyone has a body, but the boundaries between bodies and within a body are — I don’t want to say arbitrary, but the word “organ” comes from organon, which means “tool.” Is an organ part of the body, or is it a tool of the body? If you lose your arm, are you not a body anymore because you lose part of it? And the way the circulatory, muscular, and nervous systems communicate is not inherently different than the way that we're communicating right now. Do we form a body?

I think it relates to the idea of the ego and the self a lot. I think a lot about subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and transjectivity.

What is transjectivity?

It's alternate to subjectivity — it's movement. -ject is to throw, and instead of sub- being “under,” it's trans-, as in “through.” It's this idea of a self which doesn't settle into any one place, but is constantly forming. Or not even a sense of self, but just an understanding of the world. There's this term — and I don't know if it means anything to anyone but me and Patton — “ephemeral ontology,” where the ultimate version of things only exists for that one moment. And it does exist, and senses are had, and there's a physical reality, but the actual definitions of everything keep evolving and changing every second.

That establishing a view of the world that fits every moment is impossible, in a way?

Yeah, one that persists across different moments. Like, my sense of self right now is different, as I'm discussing with you. The sound you're making is affecting the way my brain processes, is physically changing the neural pathways and who I am as a body — in a different way than when I’m talking to another friend, or by myself in the woods lookin’ at some bugs. In some ways, I think I expand through other people's bodies and their senses and the way that they react to the environment. It feels like a very fluid chain, very similar to when someone steps on my toe and I sense that and react with a different part of the body.

I mean, obviously, everything I think of ends up in my art just because it's all in one hump of neural meat in my head. Thinking about things like gender has been a big part of it, as I've put more thought and time into that in the past couple years.

Because you identify as non-binary as well.

I do.

How does that affect the way you think about your work?

It also goes back to boundaries. Like, if people I’m around who are men or women or other non-binary people become part of my subjectivity or transjectivity — whatever language we’re using — then that's inherently a non-binary thing. And I think that finds its way into my work as those different boundaries get questioned. I mean, it's not just some thought experiment, but it is really how I live my life. My artistic practice is also my personal practice as a human. The boundary between art and life once again, in a sense.