great work

Especially if you work in and around institutions, where you’re trying really hard to sell your work or sell the idea of your work, it’s really tempting to want to fall very nicely into the groove of some discipline or rhetoric that people understand and can identify. It can be so uncomfortable to be working in an interdisciplinary way that’s hard... See more

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is the most powerful of all.

Four steps: choose a field, learn enough to get to the frontier, notice gaps, explore promising ones. This is how practically everyone who's done great work has done it, from painters to physicists.

These principles act as a soft manifesto for myself, and for anyone else who wants to be an artist practicing for softer reasons at softer paces in softer spaces:

1. Can you afford to break down any barriers between your work and the audience? (monetary, language, accessibility, etc.)


2. What can you gain, that is not money, from the work?


3. Who, that is not

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If you could transmit the knowledge from the great philosophy books into people’s brains through some sort of interactive experience, that would be a meaningful contribution to humanity,” Nick says.