ARTIST STATEMENT

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Only in the Dark is a site-specific projection at Art on theMART, along the Chicago Riverwalk. It begins with a sense that we are entering a new kind of darkness: environmental crises and accelerating biodiversity loss reveal the violence of human extraction, while evolving AI confronts us with technologies we have created but may no longer fully understand. In this condition, we risk becoming alienated both from the Earth and from the systems that increasingly shape our lives.

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Across three movements, the facade of the MART becomes a changing field of collapse, transformation, and possibility. A darkened structure opens into a new landscape; a biophilic building imagines a more reciprocal relationship among humans, nature, and technology. Digital animation, filmed performance, AI-generated imagery, and sound bring these scenes together as a public-scale encounter.

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The title holds a paradox: light becomes visible only in darkness. Rather than offering optimism as an escape from crisis, the work asks what difficult conditions might make newly visible—our dependence on the living world, the limits of extractive progress, and our capacity to imagine another way forward. On the Chicago River, Only in the Dark turns the city into a space for collective reflection on how technology, ecology, and human life might coexist differently.

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