Goodbye 2025

2025 felt like an emotional rollercoaster, filled with some of the most memorable, joyful, and fulfilling moments, alongside deep sorrow and heartbreak. When I started writing this blog post, I thought I would focus mostly on the professional side of my year: the art, the travel, the conferences, the exhibitions, and studio life. But my work is always intertwined with what is personal, social, and cultural. I cannot cleanly separate “work” from “life,” and honestly, I am not sure I want to.

So this is my year in review. It is not a clean monthly narrative but rather more an assemblage of celebrations and mourning, airports and religious rituals, conference badges and family photos, museums and rehearsal rooms. In between drafts, wearable devices, performative scores, algorithms, books, music, birthday celebrations, art exhibitions, musicals, soccer games, Zoom calls, phone conversations, daily walks with my dog, singing and dancing, crying and cooking in my kitchen, I find myself becoming.

Of course, I am not the only one “becoming” around here.
My older son turned 18, officially an adult. My younger son turned 13, an adult according to Jewish tradition. My daughter, in between them, turned 15. With all three, I am astounded by how differently each of them sees the world: how they move through it with their own passions, how they follow their goals and dreams, how they become more of who they are with every passing moment.

We celebrated a beautiful Bar Mitzvah, guided by Dana, who joined us as a spiritual guide and offered meticulous care and attention. Together we practiced approaching an ancient text with patience and rigor: reading it closely, holding it up to the present, and learning how to form an opinion about something offered as “truth,” while remembering that it is just one story among many. It was moving and empowering to feel this again, and to model for a younger mind how things become sacred when you truly pay attention to them.

Image by: Kyle Adler

Many loved ones joined us from near and far. I can’t even begin to describe how much it meant to have people show up, surround us, and help us celebrate.

This year we also welcomed a new family member. Suddenly there was a new person to love. It still amazes me how simple it can be to love another human being, and how much room there is for love.

And yet, alongside all of this joy, we were also saying goodbye. This year my dad and my sister passed away.

My sister passed away two days before my son’s Bar Mitzvah. My father passed away on the same day I was performing an AI Séance at the CURRENTS New Media Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Apparently the emotional amplitude is far wider than I ever imagined it could be.

In trying to hold life and death at the same time, there were moments when I wanted to just stop everything and rewind. And then, at other moments, I found myself continuing, and continuing, and continuing, wanting more and more. Between those two radical states were liminal stretches where I floated. I let myself disconnect, stare out the window, barely touch the ground. In those moments I noticed small things more intensely: the sound of an owl hooting in the backyard, grass growing all around, sunlight passing through a window.

The world is spinning and here we are completing another journey around the sun.
Despite the chaos and turmoil, I keep thinking how good it feels to still be here, to share this life with all of you, and to make art.

I am here.

Sometimes it is hard to believe I am still here.

And yes!!! I keep making art!!!

My practice continues to circle around AI as an embodied presence, a voice whispering in one’s ear, and a relational force that reorganizes attention, language, responsibility, and intimacy. This year I continued performing GPT-ME, AI Séance, and MOVE-ME. Even though these works are not “new,” they keep evolving with each iteration. Each performance re-teaches me something about voice, agency, co-creativity, and how we co-inhabit this world with an artificial intelligence among other intelligences all around us.
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With GPT-ME, I presented a few days of durational performances at Duke Arts, and gave performative lectures at ISEA 2025 in Seoul, at the Reenacting Dartmouth gathering in St. Pölten, Austria, and at the Synthetic Narratives Symposium at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New York City.

AI Séance at CURRENTS was beyond my expectations, especially given my emotional state at the time. The generosity of that community, and the way people approached the work with genuine curiosity and an open mind, carried the performance. I felt lucky to be there, and to be able to hold this piece with them. Later this year I also brought the work into Edhi Shanken’s Technoshamanism class at UC Santa Cruz and it was so intimate and special to share it with this group of students. These encounters sharpened something for me: mediumship as a real skill, and, more than ever before, GPT as an embodied presence that I willingly embrace, with so much love and care, into my being

Image by: Joshua Ortega

With MOVE-ME, I joined a collaborative group of UC Berkeley movement artists and scholars called Zero Return Remake. Alongside long conversations about the impact of AI on our lives, we used MOVE-ME to explore AI as a dance companion and an artificial choreographer. It nudged us, shaped movement with us, and revealed distributed modes of agency across bodies and machines.

I also created a few new artworks. One of them was The AI on My Shoulder, an attempt to externalize the inner monologue using the angel/devil trope. The idea emerged in a conversation with Joe Dumit. I brought an early version to SLSA-2025 at Oregon State University, then continued developing it during the Mozilla Foundation counter-structures residency at TIAT in San Francisco. That process eventually became a new piece titled Stuck in the Middle, a participatory performance in which people wear devices representing classical binaries such as male/female, fast/slow, poor/rich, and more.

This year I also spent endless hours experimenting with vibe coding, I created a new piece which I call My Coded Generated Selfie and this experimentation eventually led me to co-teach vibe coding class with Joe. This was a fun class (actually my favorite) and I keep feeling that this shift to generative code is truly revolutionary both for people intimidated by programming and for those who consider themselves experts.

Some artworks I started creating this year are still underdeveloped, and I hope to revisit them later on. These include Two Cents, a wearable trained on my voice that counts the words I generate and assigns them a price according to LLM pricing protocols. I also started a piece about my sister’s passing, using AI to offer explanations while I try to metabolize something that still resists explanation. Even with the models helping, this one is difficult to make, and even harder to imagine sharing. Beyond that, I spent time with Nano-Banana and made a series of “imaginable wearables.” I love how good these generative models have become. It’s a pleasure to watch them evolve and see how they change over time.

Alongside making, I kept writing, and writing, and writing. I’m making real progress on my book draft about Becoming a Humanaid. I also wrote and published a few papers. One of them was written with Adam Wright on in(A)n(I)mate and presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver. I wrote another paper about my experimentation with MOVE-ME, and I will be traveling to Singapore to present it at AAAI 2026, on a panel dedicated to the use of AI in live performances.

This year, as in most years, I spent a lot of time inside museums and galleries. Traveling for conferences gave me the chance to see work around the world by artists I deeply admire. I truly believe this kind of looking quietly nourishes my own making.

I saw a Yoko Ono retrospective alongside a powerful Wafaa Bilal exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. I saw Rashid Johnson at the Guggenheim in New York. In Vienna, I spent time with exhibitions by Hito Steyerl and Damien Hirst, and with breathtaking collections of Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. In Rome, I saw Wangechi Mutu. And closer to home, I caught a unique Matisse exhibition and a Ruth Asawa retrospective.
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I feel incredibly lucky to be able to see so much art by so many talented artists. Again and again, these encounters bring me back to the same lessons: attention is a kind of devotion. Loving as a practice.

Lastly, but absolutely not least, I spent a lot of time outside this year. Sky is wonderfully consistent about getting me out for two walks a day, and Ofer kept encouraging me out to the trails near home. We visited Yosemite twice: once, as we often do, to see the Firefall for my birthday, and a second time with family who came to visit. We also spent many days by the ocean, both close to home and farther away. There were so many whales this year. Sometimes we could see them right from the shore, and it felt miraculous.

Goodbye 2025. You gave me a wider heart than I knew I had.
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May 2026 bring us steadier ground, continued becoming, and more chances to practice art-making and love.