While I fashioned the Electric Desert from clear, simple, discreet shapes — triangles and tubes, flowers and nopales — they were congregated in such profusion, and in such a small space, that they surrounded and overwhelmed the viewer, transforming us into participants. In what was to be the project’s final iteration, my collaboration with engineer Arne Gullerud took another step vital to the Electric Desert as an immersive environment. Arne programmed a string of LEDs to create a twelve-minute day and night cycle. During the “day,” the black lights inside the project’s cardboard tubes seemed quiet. During the “night,” they appeared to increase in intensity, shifting the project’s simple palette. 

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My hope was to ask the kinds of questions that I hear in the high desert. Questions about the false dichotomies between “nature” and “artifice,” “sentient” and “inert,” “childhood” and “adulthood.” I hoped the Electric Desert would give rise to these questions gently, but insistently--just as the desert does.