For the second year in a row I was able to attend the opening weekend of the Art and Technology festival Currents in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here are some impressions.

It was great being back. This year my Vicious Cycles animations were included in the show.

Though I did enjoy the exhibition I ended up taking only a few pictures of it. Unfortunately there was a bit too much generative AI “art” in the show.

One very impressive and timely piece was an interactive video installation entitled Twenty Twenty-five by Ghazal Majidi. It is a video mirror, showing a running tally of bombs dropped and civilian casualties for the year 2025. As you walk closer the shape of your “reflection” gets filled in with images of explosions. Your reflection becomes an image mosaic of the violence committed, making you feel complicit.

I did help document the installation Adversarial Network created by my friend Brandon Morse, who I went to Grad School with. From the wooden pole in the middle generative video is projected onto the floor of what appear to be rocks approaching the physical structure in the center, and being pushed back by a kind of light force in the center. This creates an intriguing push and pull, which is a recurring theme in his work. It was in a separate room a bit out of the way, but the festival director, Frank Ragano, made sure to point people to it in the introduction for almost every performance. I may be biased, but it is one of the the most impressive pieces in the show. Did I mention the great soundtrack, also dynamically generated, that accompanies it?

Brandon had been working on setting up the installation since the Monday before I arrived on Friday. I felt a bit lazy not having to set up anything and simply having singe channel video works in the show.

The performances this year were great this year, with some being truly impressive. The first performance in the video below used the table you can see in the image above of my animation playing. It has rotating disks with magnets that are played using a guitar pickup element

The final performance on Saturday was musically in a league of its own. Go figure: the guitarist, Trey Gunn, used to play with Robert Fripp and was part of King Crimson for a long time.

There were a number of off-site events we checked out on Saturday. If I find time I may do a separate write up of those, this post is already pretty lengthy.

Though my visit this year was unfortunately brief, I had a great time. Did not get to play the bongos again.

The journey back home was a bit of an ordeal, taking almost an entire day in stead of the less than eight hours planned. Newark airport closed due to Thunderstorms.

Brandon and I are planning to submit work again for next year and hope to be back for Currents 2027!