What happens when imagination becomes almost limitless on a planet whose resources are not?

This digital space is not here to replace the work of an artist. It is a place where an idea can be caught while it is alive.

I can visualize it, write it, draft it, connect it to other ideas, map it out, and create instructions for how it can eventually be constructed in the physical world.

An idea can become visual, moving, limitless, and immediately connected to other ideas and people.

How can we harness all of this connection for good?

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What does all of this creation cost the Earth?

Almost everything we do now is connected to computing. AI, storage, hosting, images, video, data, and the infrastructure behind them all have an environmental impact, even when we cannot see it.

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Could creating something eventually help restore something too?

Could an artwork support renewable energy, ecological restoration, carbon removal, trees, habitat, research, or another measurable environmental good?

Could artists, scientists, and technologists invent better ways of creating together?

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The Virtual Studio is both an artistic practice and an ongoing experiment in how art can work for the greater good.

Can the act of creating also create something positive beyond the work itself?

This studio is a kind of field notebook for the way an artist first imagines a work.

It is not meant to replace making art by hand, or the beautiful, complicated process of working with physical materials. For me, that remains one of the most extraordinary parts of being an artist.

Instead, this is a place to hold everything that happens before a work is made.

Drawings, dimensions, materials, questions, instructions, references, possibilities, and revisions can all live here together.

Some of these works I may eventually make myself. Some might become proposals for residencies, grants, exhibitions, or collaborations where space, time, tools, and materials could allow them to exist physically.

Others may remain here as open ideas, perhaps even as instructions that someone else could use to make or interpret the work.

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I cannot possibly make every idea that comes to me.

Being able to capture those ideas while they are alive, and preserve them in such a rich and visual way, feels extraordinary.

But that possibility comes with responsibility.

If creating and storing all of this digitally contributes to the destruction of the very world that inspires the work, then something is profoundly wrong.

Our blue skies, habitats, ecosystems, forests, water, animals, and living world matter more than any digital tool.

So I am researching whether it is possible to make this practice differently.

Can we reduce the environmental cost of digital creation?

Can we remove or responsibly address the impact that remains?

Can we go further and design the work so that its creation produces measurable environmental benefit?

Could a digital art practice move from lower impact toward regeneration?

I do not know yet. That is part of the experiment.

I am researching cleaner computing, sustainable hosting, environmental measurement, carbon removal, renewable energy, ecological restoration, conservation, and the people and organizations already working on these questions.