What happens when you give an artist a protected year to follow what she notices?
That is the experiment behind The One Year Room.
I am a sculptor, writer, technologist, systems thinker, and lifelong maker. For more than 30 years, much of my curiosity has had a job to do: solve this problem, build this system, learn this technology, make this thing work.
Now, at a moment when machines are becoming capable of doing more of the work humans have traditionally been paid to do, I spend a lot of time thinking about what comes next. I hope the answer isn't that humans become less valuable. I am interested in the opposite possibility: that we learn to value more of what is human.
Art and craft are at the heart of that inquiry for me. Making is one of the ways we express what we notice, what we care about, how we see, what we imagine, and what only this particular human could have brought to the work.
The One Year Room gives my curiosity resources of its own.
I begin with something I notice and follow it. A rock can lead to geology, memory, Ernst Haeckel, and a Field Atlas. Wire can lead to Ruth Asawa and questions about what a line can do in space. A website can send me backward a century to El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism. One question can become sculpture, writing, a digital experiment, a tool—or something I could not have known to ask for at the beginning.
Artificial intelligence is part of the experiment, too. I am particularly interested in AI as the assistant many artists cannot afford: help with research, fundraising, administration, technical problems, and holding the history of a developing project while the artist keeps making. I am exploring tools that could make some of that assistance available to other artists, with the human firmly in charge. Where possible, useful tools and resources emerging from the Room will be shared openly and as open source.
Some things coming out of The One Year Room will be mine to make and share. Some may become useful to other people. Some haven't been imagined yet.
That's why it needs to be a room.
The point isn't to fund a predetermined list of outputs. It's to give a lifetime of curiosity, skill, making, and noticing enough room to find out what else is there.