Charles Lindsay is an intermedia artist whose work synthesizes ideas about time, technology, eco-systems and semiotics. He creates immersive environments, sound installations, still and moving pictures, sculptures built from salvaged aerospace and bio-tech equipment. Charles is a Guggenheim Fellow and founder of SETI AIR, the SETI Institute’s Artists in Residence Program. He was until recently engaged in consciousness research at Ryosoku-in Zen temple in Kyoto — with a focus on Ai. As of early 2025 the compass is in motion again. Next stop, Athens.

“Please Forget (Everything)” debuted fall 2024 at Heron Arts in San Francisco and then in Ryosoku-in Zen Temple late November along with a show at Kura Monzen Gallery in Kyoto. Both installations featured hacked Japanese parking meters selling time and space from raked ‘karesansui’ dry gardens. All venues offered superb environments in which to share and contemplate consciousness research. It was a thrilling fall — very much of an AI fueled zeitgeist — especially in San Francisco. The invitation to create these shows began with one simple question posed to Vice Abbott Toryo Ito in March 2020 during the first days of the pandemic: can Ai become sentient? If sentient, conscious? If conscious, can it become enlightened? That formerly SciFi question has quickly become prescient, provocative, news worthy — at the very least we should consider our relationship with such powerful technologies. My inquiry dovetails with a SETI-centric question I’ve long wondered which is would we recognize an enlightened being hovering directly in front of us? For that matter ET? From that vantage point what photographs would an enlightened photographer make? Well, I’ve assumed the role of artist as mystic seer, with humor and a growing sense that the art I produce best functions as Zen Kōans: those unanswerable riddles designed to befuddle the logical mind into an empty state where true knowing springs forth. In parallel, SE VENDE is my Baja based body of work, imagining a real estate gold rush on Mars through a terrestrial desert analog. The first piece sold for a single Bitcoin. There is convergence. Ever Grateful. More news soon. Thanks for visiting.

Full Biography

Educated as an exploration geologist Lindsay is the SETI Institute’s AIR Program Founder and Senior Advisor, a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art and Environment, and the innovator behind OSA EARS - a project designed to deliver real time high resolution sound and data from one of the world’s most bio-diverse eco-systems to anyone anywhere. Early in his career he lived years with the Shaman Aman Lau Lau Manai of the Mentawai tribe. He is currently engaged in consciousness research at Ryosoku-in Zen Temple in Kyoto.

At the SETI Institute Lindsay worked with astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, who employed information theory and algorithms to prove that humpback whale communications exhibit syntax - strongly inferring the whales are talking. “CODE Humpback” references this research through sculptural audio / visual works, utilizing morse code to merge ideas about encrypted signals and inter-species communications. 

Lindsay received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010) for “CARBON” - a hybrid process synthesizing photography and drawing. “CARBON” harnesses the language of high resolution scientific imaging to render ambiguous the micro and the vast, the organic and the digital, the real and the alien. CARBON is presented as photographs, and as large scale moving visuals altered through sensor feedback and modulation to create subtly responsive situations where the viewer becomes aware the art knows it is being watched. “CARBON IV” was shown at the LED LAB NYC (2014.) The CARBON monograph was published by Minor Matters Books (2016) with forwards by Lyle Rexer and Dr. Jill Tarter. 

Many ideas coalesce within the FIELD STATION's modular architecture, which debuted at MassMoCA in 2016 and continued to evolve at the Des Moines Art Center, the Akron Museum of Art in Ohio and the Beach Museum at Kansas State University. Also in process are "Mining the Moon" and “Karesansui on MARS.” “the Sound of a Quantum Computer Thinking” was created from recordings Lindsay made at NASA Ames Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. “Ecotone” envisions a mobile space in which to experience live sound and sensations from OSA EARS as though in an off earth / post earth environment. 

Recent lectures include: “How to Photograph Enlightenment / Pause translation” at Kyoto University of the Arts, “Aliens: Us/Them" at Sónar music festival, "The CLOUD: a collaborative trajectory" at Chronus Art Center Shanghai. Grey Area Festival / San Francisco, Central Academy of Art, Hangzhou, "Anthropocentric?" for RISD's Department of Digital + Media, “Setting Out" at ApexArt, “Conversations on Media Culture and Practice” at CalArts Center for Integrated Media and "Destination Unknown: Aliens, Art and Consensual Reality” for the Rhodes’ Scholars in Oxford. Lindsay has presented at Moogfest, the California Academy of Sciences, Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History, 100 Year Starship Symposium (DARPA), USC’s “Visions + Voices” performance series, Ear to the Earth, SwissNex, Gray Area, the American Museum of Natural History, Mountain Film, The School of Visual Arts, Pratt School of Art and Design, the Open Center NYC, IDEA CITY, University of Akron's SYNAPSE series, and at The Hat Creek Observatory for SETI.

The author of eight books of photographs, Lindsay has published with Aperture, Little Brown, Minor Matters, Chelsea Green, Terranova and MIT Press. His work has appeared in numerous international magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Blind Spot, Aperture, Natural History, Gastronomica, Audubon, Parabola, Orion, and GEO. Lindsay’s work has been profiled by WIRED, Motherboard, ARTonAIR.org, Viralnet, NPR and CNN International. He’s also worked with many of Japan’s leading publications.

Lindsay conceived three live music shows, for which he played six string electric cello, electronics and combinations of voice, continuum, processed field recordings, modular synth and electric guitar - not simultaneously !! All utilized projected visuals, with improvisational music developed through collaboration. The Electrosense of Paddlefish was made in response to water issues in the American west. It was created and performed with David Rothenberg for Ear to the Earth at the Frederick Lowe Theater (2010.) Trout Fishing in Space imagines off Earth habitation. Collaborators included Billy Gomberg, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Dan Snazelle and David Rothenberg. It was performed in Woodstock at CPW (2012.) NEAR(ER) imagines alternate modes of consciousness and involved Israeli video artist Chen Serfaty. NEAR(ER) was performed at USC's Rhythms + Voices performance series (2013.) 

Instagram feed below: my public journal.