My work is focused on the emergent possibilities of new organisations in this century and how they connect to practices hidden in deep time. I have pursued this through strategy, curation, publishing, and the building of new institutions, primarily within the field of culture.

Organisations

From schooling experiments in abandoned buildings as a teenager, to imaginary internet-native organisations in my early twenties, to the real ones of my mid-twenties onward, building organisations has been a way of thinking for me. Each one a test of how institutions might form and reform in response to emerging technologies.

Notable examples include unMonastery, a cybernetic monastic order merging monastic rules with open source software; Serpentine Arts Technologies, an organisation I built within the Serpentine to support the art world's transition to the technological present; and EdgeRyders, a distributed think tank born from the Council of Europe, focused on youth transition in times of crisis.

Strategy

I use strategy to create leverage, opening execution paths for organisations and individuals beyond what is typically considered possible. I'm drawn to situations where the goal seems slightly unreasonable.

At the Serpentine, I served as the first CTO of a cultural organisation in Europe, leading the institution's digital transformation across programmes, systems, teams, and commerce. The Arts Technologies department remains the most visible output of this work, contributing to the Serpentine's recognition by the Financial Times as "peerless" in the Art & Technology field. ² In Matera, I built unMonastery into the flagship project of the city's winning bid for European Capital of Culture 2019, where it also served as a think tank in tandem with EdgeRyders for developing the bid itself. More recently, I developed the organisational strategy for LAS Art Foundation, and I continue to support artist-founders, including Ian Cheng's Opponent Systems.

For long-term strategic work I engage selectively on a values-aligned basis. For shorter engagements I keep an open schedule for consulting and advisory.

Hiatus & Metamorphosis

Between 2022 and 2025 I passed through a period of deep personal transformation. One that demanded a difficult pause and an honest reckoning with myself and my creative life. During this time my work either disappeared from public view or ceased entirely. What I've found on the other side is not a return to who I was before, but something more clear-eyed and more alive. Old forms are being taken up again with renewed sensibility, new forms are being born. You can follow these developments in my newsletter, where I will begin publishing again in Spring 2026.

Rivers

Much has changed. I now live with my partner in the mountains of the Northeast United States, where we have begun a lifelong project to develop a wilderness retreat and research campus called New Water: a place dedicated to the future of technology and spirit, rooted in the landscape, and built slowly. In good time this will become public, but for now it grows quietly between friends.

Curation

Art remains the soil of my life. Some of the work I care about most has taken the form of curation, even as I've never been fully at ease with the title. Projects include BOB (Bag of Beliefs) by Ian Cheng (2018), Hito Steyerl's Power Plants (2019), Connect BTS with Jakob Kudsk Steesen (2020), the New Age Default exhibition series (2010), and lets go outside (2010). Each one has been a site of deep friendship and personal meaning as much as professional output.

Publishing

Books are central to every aspect of my life and self-expression. I think through constellations of books in the same way a chemist works with reagents. This has led me, over the past decade, to publish books and build publishing organisations. Select publications include: Atlas of Anomalous AI, Future Art Ecosystems (as strategic publishing), The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Pharmako-AI, Prophetic Dreaming. Forthcoming projects include WORLDING: A Guide for Creators in Changing Times, and the re-issue of Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Collectors Edition).

Research

Making sense in a period of historical flux requires orientation and grounding. Current areas of focus include: (1) AI's applied impact on culture and cultural industries, (2) Viability of the artist-founder, as a new trajectory of art making, (3) The architecture of new cultural ecosystems: designed, financed, and deployed as alternatives to the contemporary art world, (4) Automated and agentic publishing software, (5) Bio-regional development strategies, and (6) Unbundling religious practice into the technological field.

If any of these resonate with your own work, I'd welcome hearing from you.

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