News
The Story of the I Ching
Curious about the I Ching? James and I made a video about my favorite book and ritual. And the making-of-it will forever be connected to fast + loose fun in our living room.
Watch it here or on Youtube.
News
"Award-Winning Filmmakers"
James and I got to hold a cartoon check! First place for our film from The Nightly News. It features people's dreams and will play in the Columbus Convention Center for years, weirding out people on their way to conferences. We made a custom five-channel version for the convention center's corridor-long video screen. This generous award from the UnConventional Film Contest will help fund our upcoming new installation The Breathing Room in Columbus in Autumn 2027.
Excerpt from three-hour video loop
News
On Relationships
My first permanent public artwork will be installed in metropolitan Columbus in Dublin, Ohio! It was inspired by the pains of our age, particularly isolation and self-absorption. Let us direct our attention to our relations with others, pop out of our self-annihilating vortexes, and consider the wide range of emotions that come along with feeling connected or disconnected. Seeing other people's struggles and confusions has always given me consolation and courage to face my own.
In May 2026, I created a quick participatory installation at the Dublin branch library. It included a 10-minute video loop of handwritten reflections on relationships from past public installations, and a writing table to anonymously submit your own. Hundreds of people shared their anxieties, hopes, horrors, and pleasures around relationships, and I embedded these reflections into the final work (rendering below). The title of the artwork is "Hexagram 48 (Holding Together)" and was inspired by the I Ching and the natural forces at the heart of this area. To be installed Summer 2027.
Custom table by Tom Culp, Rulaco. Supported by Dublin Arts Council, Dublin's Public Art Board, Crawford Hoying, and Dublin Branch Columbus Metropolitan Library.
Excerpt from video on relationships
News
Midnight Radio: Bodies Without Organs
I made a Midnight Radio episode with James! I offered some songs for him to mix together in his land of reverb. He asks guests this one question and here's my answer:
Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?
Yes. Watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos was my first spiritual experience. It made me feel existentially connected to all of time, space, and life. That feeling pulled me out of despair and it was my first understanding of god: a widescreen kinship.
Now I feel spiritual in charged moments of communion—with a person, an artwork, a text, or a tree. I felt it making this episode with James. For decades we’ve been two little animals lost in time making stuff together, from janky stop-motion animations and fuzzy ambient music to public art and screenplays. We also rattle around on our own, and it’s been fun watching James make Midnight Radio. His process is loose but reverent. He tosses songs together, plays rough versions as we drive to the park, and then defers to the emerging forces. He’ll ask what I think and before we’re done bantering, he’ll say, ‘I know what it wants to become.’ It wafts through our home for days like something slowly baking until it becomes another Proustian madeleine.
One of my favorite episodes is Slow Gold (#35) where he stretched a Simple Minds track into buoyant goth. So I slipped him A Flock of Seagulls. He delivered by swelling the intro into an epic stadium show and following it with another slow-mo’d ’80s song that always makes me want to dance like a cartoon maniac.
I initially thought I’d put together a tracklist of tragic-astronaut-in-space music, which is my specialty, but the energies went somewhere more fun. In the spirit of James, I went where it wanted to go, and each version he played inspired more songs until we landed in a place that is very me but way cooler now in his land of reverb. I felt a charged back-and-forth towards something greater, and it makes me wonder if spirituality is always about resonance: being in relation and vibrating together.
In a time when it’s easy to feel disillusioned, I’m drawn to the punk philosophies of Zhuangzi and Deleuze. Zhuangzi describes riding “the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths,” which is the skill of being at home in the continuous flow of change. Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” is about obliterating conventions for dynamic fields of play. Both pursue spiritual freedom not through detachment but through deep engagement and transformation. Be game for whatever forces happen to be around you and remain curious about what they can become.
James A. Reeves