I'm Charles Lindsay, an intermedia artist exploring the intersections of time, technology, eco-systems, and semiotics. Consciousness itself is what I’m most curious about. My practice merges immersive environments, sound installations, visual media, and sculptures crafted from salvaged aerospace and biotech equipment. I'm fortunate to have been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and to have founded SETI AIR, the Artists in Residence Program at the SETI Institute. From 2020 to 2024, my creative journey took me into consciousness research at Ryosoku-in Zen temple in Kyoto, focusing particularly on artificial intelligence from a Zen perspective. Now, as of early 2025, the compass moves again—this time toward Athens.

My recent exhibition, PLEASE FORGET (EVERYTHING), debuted fall 2024 at Heron Arts in San Francisco, and shortly thereafter at Kyoto's ancient Ryosoku-in Zen temple and Kura Monzen Gallery. At the heart of these installations were a pair of hacked Japanese 'Amano' parking meters, metaphorically selling time and space from within Zen gardens (karesansui) on both sides of the Pacific These exhibitions became meditative environments, inviting contemplation of consciousness at a moment when the question of AI’s sentience has moved rapidly from science fiction into our everyday reality. The timing for these ideas was prescient, of a zeitgeist, and rewarding on many levels.

The seed for these projects emerged from a single question I posed to Vice Abbot Toryo Ito at the start of the pandemic in March 2020: Can AI become sentient? And if sentient, conscious? And if conscious, could it possibly attain enlightenment? The provocative nature of this inquiry connects directly to a question I've long pondered through my involvement with SETI: If an enlightened being—or an extraterrestrial—were directly before us, would we recognize it? And what images might an enlightened photographer create?

In this spirit, my work embraces the playful yet profound role of artist as mystic-seer. I increasingly see my creations as contemporary Zen kōans—riddles designed to short-circuit logical thinking, momentarily emptying the mind so deeper insight might emerge.

Parallel to this, my ongoing project SE VENDE reimagines a speculative real estate gold rush on Mars, staged through earthly desert analogs in Baja, Mexico. The first piece notably sold for a single Bitcoin—a convergence of conceptual art and playful provocation.

I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to continue exploring these intersections—between ancient wisdom and future possibilities, humor and profound inquiry, technology and consciousness. Next stop: Athens. More soon. Thanks for visiting.

Full Biography

Educated as an exploration geologist, Charles Lindsay is an intermedia artist, Guggenheim Fellow, founder and senior advisor of the SETI Institute’s Artists in Residence Program (AIR), recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art and Environment. Early in his career, Lindsay lived with Shaman Aman Lau Lau Manai of Indonesia’s Mentawai tribe, profoundly shaping his artistic and philosophical perspectives.

At SETI, Lindsay collaborated with astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, whose research applying information theory to humpback whale communication suggested syntactic structures, indicating the possibility for genuine interspecies dialogue. Lindsay’s "CODE Humpback" project integrated these concepts through audiovisual works, using morse code literally and as a metaphor for encrypted signals and unknown languages.

Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 for his "CARBON" series, Lindsay developed a unique process merging photography and drawing, creating images that blur distinctions between microscopic and cosmic scales, digital and organic forms. His work in this series included interactive elements, subtly responding to viewer engagement. “CARBON” was shown widely. "CARBON IV" exhibited at LED LAB NYC (2014), and the CARBON monograph (Minor Matters Books, 2016) features essays by Lyle Rexer and Dr. Jill Tarter.

Lindsay’s "FIELD STATION" modular installations debuted at MassMoCA (2016) and evolved through exhibitions at Des Moines Art Center, Akron Museum of Art, and Beach Museum at Kansas State University. Other notable projects include "Mining the Moon," "Karesansui on MARS," and sound-based works such as "the Sound of a Quantum Computer Thinking," recorded at NASA Ames Quantum AI Lab, and "Ecotone," which simulates post-Earth environments using live sound data from the OSA EARS initiative—an environmental project designed to deliver high-resolution real-time audio from one of the world’s greatest rain forests on the OSA peninsula in Costa Rica. OSA Ears was initially in development with Bell Labs.

Recent lectures include Kyoto University of the Arts, Sónar Music Festival, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, RISD, CalArts, ApexArt, Rhodes Scholars Oxford, Moogfest, California Academy of Sciences, Stanford University, DARPA’s 100 Year Starship Symposium, American Museum of Natural History, Mountain Film, Pratt Institute, SwissNex, Gray Area, and SETI’s Hat Creek Observatory.

Lindsay is the author of eight photography books published by Aperture, Little Brown, Minor Matters, Chelsea Green, Terranova, and MIT Press, with his work featured in New York Times Magazine, Aperture, Orion, GEO, and others. His work has been profiled by WIRED, NPR, CNN International, and prominent Japanese publications.

Additionally, Lindsay conceived and performed three interdisciplinary music projects—"The Electrosense of Paddlefish," "Trout Fishing in Space," and "NEAR(ER)"—combining electric cello, electronics, processed field recordings, modular synths, and visuals, presented at venues including Ear to the Earth Festival and USC’s Visions + Voices series.

Instagram feed below: my public journal.