Fieldwork

research projects/snippets/musings

May you live in interesting times.

A fascinating proverb and the title of the Venice Biennale I attended in 2019, my last cultural gambit shortly before the world paused (COVID hit). It's often wrongly attributed in popular culture to ancient Chinese wisdom, which feels fittingly apt in both calling to my heritage and ironic - as it likely actually originated in the late 19th or early 20th century from British political figures.

Since my art school days, I've always been relentlessly drawn to the space where art meets the boundary of the strange - the speculative, the ecologies, the emerging technologies. And what's emerging now in these very strange times is both the ground itself shaking under our feet, the air shimmering in 4D space - and something new altogether.

I don't know what it is, or where we're going. But I find myself back at the screen with the same compulsion I had at twelve, making glowing neon HTML sites with glittering banner animations. A new digital era. I feel caught between two threads - the terror of a sci-fi dystopia descending on us like a herd of electric sheep - and a pressing desire to press on, forward. Regardless.

How do we ground machine sensing in human feeling and desire?

What awaits us in this brave new world? What will CG, design, or art direction look like when machines uncannily copy our work and sap us of our creative energy? A prescient substack essay by Lyle W. Fass I read recently called The Only Freedom My Mother Gave Me has stuck with me:

"The world decides almost everything for you. [...] Inside that machine, taste is the only territory that actually belongs to you. No one can make you enjoy a movie. No one can force you to love a wine. They can shame you, lecture you, call you uncultured or contrarian or basic. They can push you to pretend. But that tiny inner flicker of “yes” or “no” is yours. That’s sovereignty. It explains almost everything about how I move through the world.

If you can’t choose your health, your job, your future, you can still choose what you love. [...] Taste is the entry-level version of political clarity. It’s practice for not letting someone else colonize your inner life. [...] “I like this. I don’t like that.” The rest of my life has just been elaborating on those two sentences."

+ LIDAR + GAUSSIAN SPLATS
+ EXPLORING SPATIAL PERCEPTION & AUTONOMOUS DRIVING
> SENSING TOMORROW BRIEF
> PART OF ELECTRIC RESEARCH

So here is a call to myself: to put my humanity first as I choose what I love - creating worlds, stories, exploring what's possible.

I'm not an 'AI-first' person. What interests me now and has always interested me is to explore (and break) new tools and technology. Is AI 'just a tool'? Can a machine be a 'collaborative partner'? Does meaning and feeling live in people and things, or the relationships between them? The liminal vectorial pockets, full of fluff and fuzzy semantic edges.

The things you'll see here on this page are a jumble of curious objects: fully fledged research projects, AD thinking/references, AI tool workflows, explorative r&d. None of them are finished conclusions (and, in fact, are more likely to have led into each other, like a rhizomatic warren of potato roots).

Below is what that looks like in practice. Ongoing, unfinished, raw and distilled fieldwork. So welcome - to my digital garden. I'll keep planting things as ideas grow. I'm building alongside the tools that are reshaping how creative work gets made, and figuring out what that means for the kind of work I want to direct. To ground these new ways of working in human feeling, desire and curiosity.

Lorem Ipsum...

"The environmental scientist Donella Meadows said that to change the system, the most important leverage point is our ability to let go of our paradigm—in other words, the ability to let go of our worldview, of our identity. My work for the last 15 years is about how we change the paradigm. We do that through storytelling and through undermining—with facts—the current paradigm."

- John Fullerton, author of Regenerative Economics

Projects / Explorations

Fieldwork
A way of practising with machines,
memory, sources,
spatial imagination,
and taste
2026 - ongoing

Generative workflows
2026 - ongoing

Puck
AI personal assistant x
art/ecology/philosophy project x
research atelier
2026 - ongoing

Sensing Tomorrow
research brief
machine sensing x
spatial intelligence
@ Electric Theatre Collective
Jan - April 2026

Tools / Workflows

Figma Weave
AI/generative workflows

Generative LLMs
Nano Banana Pro
GPT Images 2
Kling 3
Veo 3.1
Seedance 2

Coding LLMs
Claude Code / Codex

Vision/Capture Tech
gaussian splats / lidar
computer vision analysis
tracking algorithms
satellite earth data

Skills

creative direction
art direction
cultural / visual / brand research
deck building
writing / thinking
new tech experimentation

Things I’m Reading

What If The Economy Was Modeled After Ecology?
Atmos Magazine
John Fullerton

The Strange Marvel of China’s Stone Feasts
The Financial Times
Fuschia Dunlop

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and The Emergence of Personhood
Aeon Magazine
Joao de Pina-Cabral

AI Will Never Have the Sentience of Animals
Atmos Magazine
Michael Pollan

Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste
The New Yorker
Kyle Chayka

JOEY ⊹ ࣪ ˖

PHINN

Welcome to my digital garden. I plant seeds haphazardly and joyfully, and see what sprouts in the spirit of exploration.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧✿

Projects. Fieldwork. Info. Play. Insta. Are.na.

Welcome to my digital garden. I plant seeds haphazardly and joyfully, and see what sprouts in the spirit of exploration.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ ✿

Projects.
Fieldwork.
Info.
Play.

Insta.
Are.na.