medium: language mode: public practice

a rhyme in sunshine and UV-cured resin. two prints of the same generative metaphor, one inscribed in light, the other rendered as a handheld device. both a mix of code and concrete poetry, both conjured from verse, both continually crossing the threshold between the virtual and the visceral. my kind of couplet... first born in 2024 from words in “the first quartet,” part of my project FOUR CORE TEXTS. not an illustration, per se, but part of the text itself, embedded in the digital paper on which the audiovisual poem was “printed.” when i began writing new poems after the kalmyk epic of jangar, it kept returning. a generative refrain, an echo of jangar’s roots in oral tradition and kalmyk folksong. an image remembering something older than itself. sometimes i think about how artists return to the same subjects over and over again -- picasso’s dora maar, hockney’s swimming pools, louise bourgeois’s spiders -- and how often i feel drawn to do the same with poetry. in series like REPETAE and through approaches like the jangar show's cycles of creative reincarnation, i compose and recompose the same words, phrases, subjects, themes, images, metaphors, not to repeat myself, but to discover what else they might contain, what else they might want to show me. i take such enormous pleasure in this kind of repetition. a poem finding its way into another poem, an image rhyming with itself across modes and materials. a process that is, in and of itself, an ode to poetry as a technology of endless transmission and transformation. always becoming, never complete.

the release of "digger," and the response to it, has got me mulling over the state of arts criticism, and how much it's come to reflect the polarization of the world around us. "good" or "bad." masterpiece or disaster. the rush to deliver a verdict, to take a side, to be right. as though the critic's job is to be a judge, rather than a translator, an interlocutor, a guide through unfamiliar territory. i've always appreciated cultural criticism that feels like a conversation with works and ideas, rather than a pronouncement about them. criticism that holds space for curiosity rather than certainty, and extends that curiosity even to work that confounds us -- especially from artists who've already taught us new ways of seeing. i tend to find it more exhilarating to encounter something on its own terms rather than on my own, especially when i don't yet know what to make of it. that feels like a superpower these days, one we're neglecting and forgetting how to use. criticism has the power to resist the flattening of public discourse, to remind us of the value of nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction -- all increasingly in short supply. and i've been thinking more broadly, too, about how there is safe art, tasteful art, accomplished art, art that meets our expectations. and then there is brave art. not that these are mutually exclusive categories. but there is art that looks beautiful and polished on a museum wall, art that knows how to look like Art. and then there is art that breaks the rules, that doesn't particularly care whether it looks like art at all, that isn't trying to be anything except the truest possible expression of itself. and how, if you make brave art, a lot of people are going to give you a lot of shit. you're going to get bad reviews. you're going to be mocked, dismissed, misunderstood. because you're doing something that many of us don't yet have the language, the reference points, or the imagination to recognize. of course not everything experimental or misunderstood is brilliant. not every provocation is profound. harsh criticism can be justified, illuminating, essential. but this seems like a moment to remind ourselves that making the art we need -- not necessarily the art we want, or even the art we deserve -- requires a willingness to be illegible, unpopular, ridiculous. to resist the temptation to make something everyone already knows how to appreciate. because art isn't only here to confirm what we already know, or to reward us for having good taste. it's also here to make us uncomfortable, confound our expectations, challenge our assumptions, show us something we don't yet know how to see. that takes bravery from the artist. but it also takes a great deal of courage from the audience. a willingness to encounter something without immediately needing to understand it, categorize it, approve of it. to sit with uncertainty. to open up questions instead of shutting them down. to entertain the possibility that what looks like failure, absurdity, or bad taste just might be the first sounds of a language we haven't learned to speak yet. nytimes.com/2026/10/14/opini…

Volume up 🔊

a few things i’m surprised that visitors are surprised by when they come see my jangar show: the beaded malas actually "mean" something! they’re not random patterns or decorative arrangements, but poetry in translation -- lines of a kalmyk oral epic rendered visceral, tangible, encoded in analog binary code, part of a series of concrete poems i've been making for about a decade. every material used for this beadwork has meaning, too. mongolian jade, fluorite, camel bone, turquoise, gobi agate, copper, rosewood -- each chosen for its particular origin story, resonance, and relationship to the content of the poetry they embody. the poems printed on the linen scrolls are my original verse -- three new poems composed in response to my readings of the kalmyk epic of jangar, rendered into visual poems via my REPETAE algorithm and many hours soaking in tea and sunshine. the 3D-printed objects are all original sculptures i’ve designed and modeled from scratch, down to the tiniest details -- from the white leather boots i've worn for over a decade and ray-bans on my khutulun avatar to the mongolian calligraphy and circuitry motifs. no off-the-shelf models or outsourcing here. i’ve had multiple 3D printers in my workshop for years. the CURSIVE BINARY calligraphy is hand-painted onto vintage projection screens, which ingeniously collapse into their own little carrying cases. (everything in this show has to do with transmission, portability, my nomadic roots and my interest in digital nomadism.) i've accumulated a collection of dozens of these beautiful old screens, part of my lifelong love of vintage objects and thrifting (something my husband and i do together nearly every weekend). i love giving obsolete technologies new lives. the small green works on paper are cyanotypes -- manifestations of latent glyphs printed using sunlight, water, and chemistry. each one is a unique physical object, not a digital reproduction. perhaps the biggest surprise is how much my fingerprints are on everything. people often ask if i delegate to a team of assistants or a project manager; they assume i work with coders, video editors, graphic designers, fabricators. that i have an idea and hand it off. but i've written, voiced, coded, designed, sculpted, printed, assembled, strung, knotted, and finished every element of this exhibition. every twist of wire, every bead, every tassel, every tiny detail. when the 3D printer broke, i pried open its cover and dug around and tinkered til it was fixed. "digital art" doesn't just export itself from a computer; "AI art" isn't just about pressing a button. it comes from an artist, her weird thoughts, her unrelenting obsessions, a polyphony of ghosts on her shoulders. a person sitting on the floor of a studio surrounded by craft tools and spools of thread and bowls of beads and monitors and keyboards and clouds of incense and safety goggles and cardboard scraps dotted with epoxy glue and vats of resin and pigment mixed and measured in the moment. everything in this show has come into existence somewhere between the code and the copper, the ancient and the emerging, the imagined and the material. between the outstretched palms of my hands, my thinking fingers -- the mind's hardware.

With @GrandeBrera’s director, Angelo Crespi, in Milan. We fell quite naturally into a long conversation about Ezra Pound (“il miglior fabbro”) & I was so happy to duck out of art-opening small talk and into poetry. Thrilled to share this show has been extended — more soon. 💚

goodnight ❤️

“And if the poet doesn't risk absurdity, he isn't even in the game.” – D. A. Powell

cannot wait til the copper starts to oxidize 🙏💚

Very excited to introduce Contxt Workspace for Museums — a promising first step toward bringing every museum natively into the digital world. Every institution we spoke with faces the same challenge: tiny teams managing collections of hundreds of thousands of artworks and their rich curatorial histories. Hundreds of millions of data points for one-and-a-half people to work through. Impossible to get done. Contxt Workspace was built from the ground up to give those teams real operational leverage. It reads, sorts, edits, and connects everything so any question can be answered in minutes rather than weeks. It also prepares every artwork, exhibition, and person for easy digital publishing — so the treasure trove of your institution’s history can finally be used to tell more and better stories, both online and in the building.

my kind of illuminated manuscript. my kind of encoded metaphor. my kind of wearable tech. my kind of digital art. my kind of printing press. my kind of poetry.

goodnight from milan 💚

Most of what we call human intelligence lives at the level of society, not the individual. None of us knows how to build a toaster from scratch on our own, yet together we can get to the moon. The most capable AI today operates the same way: as societies of models.

We did it! The Dead Internet Museum is open to Nov 1st at MAD Arts. 10,000 sq ft and 18 rooms. Guests move through the DIM with immersive audio and dedicated devices that let them manipulate screens throughout the exhibition. The arts research project explores the implications of AI. DIM is an open prototype from @ColumbiaDSL - co-created by the Last Human Collective.

Performance with my longtime poetry mentee BINA48 at @LincolnCenter, 2024, as part of The Dream Machine Experience, conceived by the legendary Nona Hendryx. In collaboration with choreographer Francesca Harper and dancers from Alvin Ailey, in an Afrofuturist garden designed by Mickalene Thomas.

can't wait - mega congrats! xo

They say if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Um, this is definitely the right room… The Long Now Foundation, November 10.

brava, fanny!