Social destabilization, defined by fluctuation and mutability, has historically yielded a proliferation of utopian and apocalyptic visions. The psychedelic counterculture of 1960s and 1970s California grew out of a state of flux, making many advances towards a utopian future. Currently, much of the world has been unsettled in our shift from an analog to a digital society. This destabilization, a continuation of the change set in motion in the 1960s, has led to the rise of techno-utopian visions and prophecies of a technological apocalypse.

My recent work, including the installation We May See A Great and Unrecognizable Future, consists of discreet objects and collections in a range of media, in physical and digital form. The work explores the role of destabilization in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, the history of California utopian movements, and my own history, growing up in post counterculture rural California. Through this examination, we may begin to understand how — as a direct evolution of the non-linear models of thinking proposed by the psychedelic counterculture and Deleuze and Guattari — our current cultural moment is a moment of destabilization, coaxing the emergence of new utopian and apocalyptic visions.