"The seeds of these works began germinating in late 2023,  when I began developing ideas related to modern spiritual aesthetics, particularly Buddhism in the United States. I felt strongly that Western Buddhism—and the forms of practice that have grown from it, such as secular mindfulness—is reliant on visual styles and forms of communication that stagnated in the 1980s. More likely the case that it is only—still—repeating forms that it inherited from its Asian parent cultures. In instances where this is NOT the case, spiritual trends have largely capitulated to the worlds of late capitalism and influencer culture. For the most part, the only ways in which these spiritualities engage with technology are as means of address: that is, as forms through which to transmit content. Often, they don't engage with the question of technology itself, particularly the ways in which screens and online realities impact our minds, flesh, nervous systems, and subtle bodies. This is all to say, these traditions are still teaching as though the world has not been captured by the technologies, politics, and power dynamics of Silicon Valley: smartphones and screen time, the connected isolation of social media, parasociality, misinformation and virality, and now artificial intelligence.

Eventually, these observations led to collaborative conversations with Adam Lobel, themselves leading to an online class called "ELON: The Emerging Legacies of Neocolonialism", in which we first theorized and then explored the multiple technological captures that beset us. These are: immediacy (the compression of time and the speed at which we're aware), utility (the way in which personalities are formed into machines of productivity and reactionary social modalities), and engineering (the control of the earth and bodies through large-scale data harvesting projects). Each of these captures sits within a larger enclosure structuring global civilization, a capture that is now experiencing a violent revitalization: colonialism.

It is my feeling that any form of life in our time—any examined life, shedding ignorance—must take these captures deathly seriously.

In that spirit, these works aim to bring the timelessness of Dharma into deep productive conversations with the timely shape of our lives in the mid 21st century. What does technology do? Who does it work for? For those people and institutions that are currently controlling the development of technology, what kinds of societies and futures are they building? How do these developments affect us, in our various lived realities? How do we practice as, and inquire into, these technologies through radical art, spirituality, magic, and culture more broadly? What are forms of spiritual practice that are not just sensitive to cutting edge technologies, but ground themselves in the rapidly shifting experiences of our lives within the technosphere?

Be introduced through just this."