As I embark on two desert-filled experiences in the next month, I’m reflecting on the last few years or so and the moments these experiences have provided me. Just as I have looked for escape on Islands, my time in the desert landscape has been about freedom. A romanticization of the American West and Americana led me away from Chicago and towards Texas. I had been feeling trapped in the city and I looked to a place where people once felt a sense of freedom and expansion. While this often came at the expense of those that once lived there many of these deserts were empty of locals and newcomers alike. Interspersed in my time in Texas I’ve been venturing out west.
From Utah to Arizona and Colorado, I stopped holding my breath without the expectations of those around me. The first experience was in September of 2021. Only two weeks after a hospital visit and a mostly social suicide, I embarked on an experience I couldn’t cancel. This was Summit Series. The venture capital backed ideas festival. I flew into Page, Arizona and hitched a ride with the massage therapist for the retreat on a van. As he stopped for booze at the liquor store, I wasn’t sure what I was about to embark on. There I ran in the desert, met mommy influencers, a soon to be vindictive venture capitalist, the fashionable and feisty festival founder, and pioneers looking to expand their network out west. As an indigenous leader led us on a hike, we all got down on the ground face down, and faced ourselves.
I continued to have experiences like this. I ran up Treasure Hill in Park City through no crossing signs and melting snow, up Antelope Island in Utah with young conservatives for the environment, and through Palm Springs towards Idylwild with techno-utopians. As I reflect on my trip to Zion, with liberal and radical outdoor education leaders, I’m feeling a sense of completion.
These experiences have not necessarily been where I’ve felt the most community but rather they have represented possibilities and the freedom to dream of something different. Of alternative futures and microcosms in isolation. Last up I have the Telluride Film Festival, and Form Festival in Arcosanti, Arizona. While living the desert life can be freeing it is easy to lose yourself. I’m hoping to land this ship soon. As this season comes to an end, and I promise myself to be in spaces where my sense of self is committed to the futures presented around me, I write these poems to close this chapter out.
The dichotomy of being a group in isolation is it allows the self or groups of selves to fully live in their realities without the outside world. Communities can be built here but bridges can’t be crossed. Deserts have long symbolised physical and spiritual isolation but also served as places for purification and trial. At the Contemporary Art Museum in Scottsdale, I was taken aback by the statement, “Floating Seeds make Deep Forms”. I definitely saw myself as a floating seed, becoming an architect of my own making, as I explored networks and cultures. From gathering to gathering, this allowed me to reworld and reflect the complex nature presented around me and move towards a “liminal expanse of ambiguity.” In the desert, logic and binaries fall out the window as the harshness of reality and sunset dreams take over.
At Arcosanti, sweat ran down my back as I made the mile long trek up and up into the musical amphitheatre daily. Electronic artists and alcoholic agua fresca provided the backdrop for rhythmic dancing, jazz meditations, and discussion around art, powering concerts with car batteries, and the state of reproductive rights in Arizona. This eco-village had been the founder’s vision whose maths didn’t account for 105 degree Arizona Octobers in the face of climate change half a century later. On the last day, I sunk into a deep meditation with Envelop, an outdoor sonic space where I put all my mental energy into aligning my chakras. While many have criticised the real lives of participants at things like Burning Man, due to the amount of personal capital it takes to create a temporary city, the other reality, the liminal space, is one that also exists. Unfortunately those without the capital to venture out to the middle of nowhere are also not given the ability to dream of a world anew.
More permanent intentional communities have explored, succeeded, and failed, in creating social systems and structures that support humanity. But for now my main focus was just around connection. Connection to the land is an important one, as is an eventual collective memory and shared future-but these realities can be built. Even the present need not be shared. Rather as the heat turns us all gregarious as we heave up the winding staircase hills, we begin to be tied closer together, our shared present becoming more obvious. Music also seems to be a pattern, the way different artistic mediums, can both create undeniable shared experiences but also increase empathy. This and spiritual experiences can make us not only more connected to others, but more connected to ourselves and to a higher power.
Neuroaesthetics is a field that explores how the arts affect the brain and why humans are drawn to specific types of images. I’ve been curious about how we can democratise social connection, and I believe neuroaesthetics plays a key role in this. I envision creating a community experience that blends in-real-life and virtual components—a platform where users can create and share stories that bridge divides. Instead of using algorithms that reward "sticky" content, which often drives division and extremism, this platform would reward non-adhesiveness, promoting connection and empathy.
The immersive stories would be shared with those least likely to know someone with that particular experience. This content would exist on Web3 and be monetized so that creators retain ownership of their stories, with tokenization providing rewards for their reach. For example, this could be built on Polygon using the Lens protocol as a decentralised social network. Fixed community pillars, similar to Radha Agarwal’s principles of belonging would be necessary, with opportunities for the community to come together in real life. Larger stories could be optioned into bigger productions, akin to WaterBear’s social impact storytelling for films, and their impact as it relates to increasing empathy and driving social change in the general public could be studied digitally in the same way that conventional media is studied at the Norman Lear Center.
Travelling alone on many of these trips allowed me to not only observe communities but also to engage with them. As a “floating seed,” I felt a closer connection to groups I might not have interacted with in my day-to-day life. In these moments, I could suspend reality and envision possibilities, something I believe can be replicated digitally. While parts of the internet are consumed by the past, driven by algorithms and capitalism, there is another, more undefined part of the internet that calls for people to envision something different. Just like the original Prophet in the Desert, Paolo Soleri and his architectural vision for community in Arcosanti, the desert proved to be the only place where I could begin to imagine new ways of fostering connection and community.
As always these experiences have birthed an upcoming poetry series with the following titles:
Big Water( Lake Powell, Utah)
La Paloma( Tucson, Arizona)
Agua Caliente( Palm Springs, California)
Agua Fria( Sante Fe, New Mexico)
A Desert Zionide( Zion National Park, Utah)
Cortez( Cortez, Colorado)
The Prophet in the Desert( Arcosanti, Arizona)
Until next time-
Yorumlar