Lists, Lists and More Lists

Hi again from UNM... Below is our class response to the original Walker list provocation. The last is our edited and discussed final list.

Walker:
Hybridity
Appropriation
Performance
Space
Time

Felicie:
Respect
Dissolution
Inclusion
Engagement

Jennifer:
Succession
Exploration
Displace
Sensitivity
Process

Gene:
Structure
Function
Process
Driving force
Sustainability

David:
Pasear (walk)
Estampa (to make a mark)
Colonizacion
Poner la bandera (plant flag)
Enmarcar (Frame the landscape)
Recordacion (Memory)

Final List:
Dissolve
Enmarcar (Frame)
Engage
Relolectar (Recollect)
Witness

Provocation 2

I’d like to begin with saying congratulations to Kim on her new JackRabbit Homestead site. I look forward to the book.

Susan, you have given us a complicated provocation. I hope this response doesn’t completely miss your point. I see the current hybridity in the arts as being the result of several factors. One is the very fact of how the arts are situated in the larger culture. We are a marginalized practice. This means that the support levels for our practice fall far below those for more mainstream interests likes sports and science. As a result, we have all had to juggle our art practice with some other endeavor to pay the bills and support our art habit at one point or another in our careers. We have been forced to hybridize. I’m not complaining, I think this fact has us well positioned for a new dynamic sweeping the culture. For me personally this meant building houses in Santa Fe for eight years after school. During that period, my sculpture was all native material based (adobe, juniper and aspen), so, building houses out of adobe with viga and latilla ceilings was just a different context for the same practice. It directly lead to adding shelter to the conceptual focus of my work.

Over the past century (or centuries) our culture has been on a course of ever increasing specialization. Scientific disciplines have pursued their own interests, and developed their own languages with which to communicate. This was equally true of the visual arts under modernism. Painting was involved with the formal issues particular to painting, sculpture pursued a separate, if related set of inquiries.

There seems to be a growing awareness throughout western culture that this specialization has become a dead end and that we need to cross reference between disciplines to reach larger understandings. The result is a hybridization movement in the arts and sciences. Biologists are talking to physicists and mathematicians. Artists are not only combining sculpture, painting and photography, they are reaching out to the sciences (hard and social) to effect a reintegration of these currently distinct pursuits and thereby the cultural psyche. Those of us in the field of Environmental or Eco Art are participants in this hybridization.

I’d suggest that the fact that artists in our culture have been forced to operate in the zone of professional hybrids has provided us with the skills necessary to function in this new paradigm. We’re used to juggling realities.

By the way, we will be attempting the feature these hybrid forms in our LAND/ART project this summer and fall in New Mexico.( landartnm.org) .
BG

hybridity, pits and stomachs

I liked the idea of feeling hybridity in the pit of a stomach and perhaps its necessity to survival. I see hybridity as a re-enactment of renaissance ideology. Homo faber becomes art's resistance to the dominant "buy everything" paradigm. Making in and of itself is a revolutionary act.

In our conversation in Art and Ecology class we came upon an analogy of creative process to ecological process. I queried the students as to how such a relationship worked and we discussed a kind of gap, we assume exists in creative process -- input in, output out, but in between the human mind/experience/hand creates something unknown, and not replicable from one maker to another. Then we wondered about where that gap exists in ecological process. Bill proposed procreation as such a gap. I, intially, having just been through having a baby and seeing its prosaic side, thought not, but in mulling and caring for the now six month old, have found a mystery in the replication of species that does seem to mirror the creative gap, as well as seeking a deeper understanding of the preciousness of the mundane creative. Rather than elevating any one act to higher, seeking to look deeply into every act.

I spent last week on spring break with my husband, hiking the borders of Albuquerque with eight teenagers, carrying my six month old son on my chest. The creative process of understanding the city from its edges became a real exercise in detail. The plants are ever so different on each edge. The whiffs of danger, from the lawless west side with a newly excavated set of bodies dumped some ten years ago and the memorials to a teenager burned alive by his peers, contrast with the east side's friendly hikers in the latest Patagonia shorts carrying nothing but keys as they exercise for their hearts. North and south are both pueblo boundaries. Northern is populated up to the edge with large horse estates. South is empty and our hike ended at a 1915 survey marker showing the edge of the airforce base while helocopters buzzed by checking us out.

As we walked, I found myself pondering the fragile wetness of human life often. My son's mouth searches for my hand and chomps, a surpising silky wet orifice in a dry land. We often keep him diaperless, so I was stopping to let him pee at the side of the trail. So wet on both ends. The students were charmingly unprepared to walk at the beginning of the week and not so charmingly wedded to their electronic devices.

thoughts

Cultural Hybridity Week 2 Provocation Comments from Karen Keifer-Boyd on Hyphen-UnPress

Provocation 2 on Cultural Hybridity: How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?

My response considers the use of a hyphen to suggest cultural hybridity and critical landscape. The hyphen forms a condensed metaphor in which the relationship is highlighted to question familiarity of the ideas on either side of the hyphen, and in order to arrive at a problematic insight of an unknown unity (e.g., see Wimsatt’s theory of hyphen as literary aesthetics). What is privileged in the symbolic conjunction indicated by the hyphen, both visible and/or erased? Consider mid-life, youth-oriented, body-enhancement, knowledge-producing, lip-service, half-full, pre-moistened, post-menopausal, cross-town, arts-based, and other hyphenated creations. Oft times, a hyphen indicates a previously hostile or unsympathetic relationship. Consider race-nation hyphenated constructions.

We move through our lives with multiple identities, sharing one facet of ourselves with one group and a different facet with another, at times, very visible and at other times, hidden in the wrinkles of our lives. Participating in multiple small cultures, our lives are coded in many hyphenated ways. Hyphen-UnPress signifies Deborah Smith-Shank’s and my own (Karen Keifer-Boyd’s) hyphenated names, and it also honors the multiple other intersections and detours that encompass our lives. From this premise, Debbie and I have created Hyphen-UnPress. Our devotion to social and political pursuits was the germinating impetus for creating the new Press, and it now serves as the umbrella under which the creation of the Visual Culture & Gender journal is one subsidiary. This multimedia journal is situated in the online environment and in the lives of its readers enlarged little by little with the translations into different languages.

belated week one and two

Dear everyone,
Hello from california. So sorry that I have not posted over the past couple of weeks. I have been reading and thinking and writing, but just have not found the time to compose a few paragraphs. it has been a particularly busy month.

Back to Bill Fox’s first question about appropriating terminology… My work often crosses over into the fields of architecture, urban planning, sociology, etc—all fields in which I have never had serious academic training. The wonderful thing about coming to these related issues as an artist, rather than an academic grounded in a specific field, is that I am able to re-frame these terms, placing accepted truths in new contexts, with new interpretations. As an artist I feel quite comfortable borrowing terms from a variety of disciplines, I can mash them together, put them in a different light. These “borrowed” terms” not only inform the way we make/articulate artwork; in an ideal situation, our appropriation can also inform the way those academics use their own terms too, actually expanding definition and context for them. I teach in a liberal arts college, and to me it is incredibly important that the arts remain the hub of the liberal arts, rather than an adjunct department off to the side. At Oberlin, more students pass through art classes from other departments than most any other department on campus, so we are constantly seeing the infusion of many varied lingos and contexts into our students’ paintings and sculptures and net art. The creative process of re-working ideas and putting them in new contexts is central to the arts––and increasingly, the artists’ re-imagined use of these terms and ideas is becoming integral to the development/progress in other fields. I had an environmental studies student last semester make a sculptural visualization of some principles she had been studying in her environmental economics class, an experience that deepened her own understanding not only of what art can be, but what economics can be. http://youwillneverfind.us/landarts/exhibit/margaret

On to week two---In terms of hybridity… Again, I think of my students. I am reminded every day that they learn in a different way than I did when I was in school, simply because they have grown up in a dramatically more hybridized world, and many of the creative tools that I use in my art practice have been a part of their lives since they could sit at the computer. I will be emphatic about the impact of a networked culture, a google culture, a facebook culture. And they shrug and remind me that they started their first blog when they were in 6th grade, a few years after they learned to use digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, their iPod, their first cell phone. Often I am invited to take part in conferences or symposiums about digital arts and the institution, questioning how museums and colleges are changing in light of digital/media/hybrid arts. And I generally feel like it would have been important to include a few 20 year olds in those conversations. When I am talking about integrating digital media into say, my tenured painting friend’s painting class, I often feel like I am explaining to her how she can use digital media, not how a kid-who-has-used-the-internet-since-the-age-of-3 can use the media. Which can lead to some circular conversations. Same with hybridity. My college students cross over between the silos on campus so fluidly, their painting projects intersect with my electronic music classes and their economics with my "land arts in an electronic age" class, while the institution is scratching its head.

All to say: I am excited for the future, cant wait to see how things change when these 20 year olds start taking part in these conversations. (This conversation that we are having on this blog, is, by the way, totally interesting and compelling, and I am not saying it is not worth having these conversations. I just think my students are having a very different version of this conversation, and I learn a lot from them too.)

Response to Week 2 Provocation

Susan asks a question that is, from my point of view, important to think about if we claim an allegiance or at least identification with the intersections between art + environment. She writes: "Of course, ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it?" It's a fabulous question--one which I think is about as generative and provocative as we'll encounter. The scientific notion of an ecological system defies cultural boundaries (the Columbia River watershed has very little interest in national boundaries, for example), and yet ecological systems are also conditioned by culture--consider, for example, the effects of historical-cultural (mis)information regarding the restoration of grey wolf populations in Wyoming, Montana, and Minnesota. What I find compelling, ultimately, about art + environment is the power of art and other creative production to reveal, reflect, challenge, and perhaps even reinforce ecological and environmental thought and practice; to elicit complex dialogue; to effect change. I think it is also tied to Bill Gilbert's response to Bill Fox's Week 1 provocation, so bear with me as I try to connect the thoughts.
Hybridity, hybrid identity, hybrid artwork, hybrid practice all seem to permit a kind of freedom from categorization that is very attractive in contemporary culture. Perhaps it's the promise of more possibility, less limitation--a kind of artistic resistance to the homogenizing influence of the economically-driven mainstream art world. And yet hybridity bears such currency in today's art world that this concept too has been altered and commodified. Yet I think that in the field of art + environment hybridity as an artistic goal might be linked to an ecological/environmental framework (agenda?) productively. Bill Gilbert mentioned the ecological concept of ecotones being used as a framing device for the art + ecology program at UNM. As a transition area between two or more ecolgical communities, an ecotone is a profoundly rich area of ecological diversity, full of organisms practicing hybridity for survival. Do artists find more possibility, more "strategies for survival," in hybridity? Will a museum such as the one in which I work find some similar prospect in the "+" of art + environment?
The artist Ray Kass inhabits a hybrid identity as an artist, and also hybridizes the creative process. In his work Broad Channel: Vorticella Polyptych, Kass worked with a number of participants of the Mountain Lake Workshop to create an enormous, multi-paneled (polyptych) mixed media piece (it's approximately 30 feet wide in total). The work is actually paper stretched like canvas over stretcher bars. Working collaboratively, and thus more like an ecological system, Mountain Lake Workshop participants held the paper over smoking fires, capturing the smoke in the papers' fibers; they applied watercolor pigments randomly, and then buffed the surface of the paper using beeswax. Interestingly, the vaguely ziggurat-shaped areas of each dominant color in the piece resemble the structure of an organism called Vorticella, a single-celled protozoa, one species of which is endemic to the New River Gorge in West Virginia, part of the piece's inspiration. The process of the work's creation "imitates the chance processes of nature," according to a statement on Kass's website. If so, might this be a new typology of landscape painting in the 21st century? What might it teach us about how to live well in place?

Response to Susan

I am going to go back to the questions put out by Susan at the end of her Week 2 provocation.

“Do you think this is a valuable conversation to have, or are we at the point where it is no longer relevant to include our choices of media and techniques when we express an idea or theory?”

I would like to talk about this from a pedagogical point of view, as this is an issue that is constantly bombarding me where I teach at SDSU. I am now an associate professor at SDSU teaching in the Multimedia emphasis area, a term that a colleague and I ended up using for our emphasis area to define the type of interdisciplinary practice our students are interested in—who work with computers and other “new” media.

For me, multimedia is somewhat awkward as it implies a reference to a specific media as the definition of artistic practice. I am much more interested in creative practice that is defined by issues such as Art/Ecology or Identity/Gender. When people ask what I do, I suggest that my practice investigates the built environment, ecology, environmental issues, cultural geography, and activism through a variety of mediated forms such as Web projects or installations. Still, it is sometimes hard for an layperson interested in the arts to grasp this concept. Most are still looking for a concise description such as photographer or painter unfortunately. Because I am interested in sharing my work outside of the art world with this lay “art” public it has become important for me to educate my audience about the breadth of interdisciplinary practice occurring in contemporary art. For the most part, many are open to this interpretation.

“Do you think of yourself as a hybrid artist?”

Yes, I do feel that this label suits my practice well. Sometimes I like to use the term “cultural producer” instead of artist but then that can be confusing.

“Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?”

Let’s just say that I feel it is perhaps harder not to do so in contemporary art practice these days.

week 2

Hi All,

[“…ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it? Is this practice really above the global issues of cultural hybridity? How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?”]
-- Susan

Regarding whether ecology and environmental work transcends cultural boundaries I present the ecology of the much-maligned tick!

The tick’s “environment” is defined by its sensory perception of 3 and only 3 things (effectors) – heat, light and the scent of butyric acid, which is emitted by the tick's warm-blooded mammal prey. The tick lives life in relation to these sensory elements and often waits for long periods of time on a blade of grass for the perfect moment to jump and attach itself to its prey. Its environment is defined by these 3 effectors, for lack of a better word.

Thinking of the environment in this way, in terms of what affects us and what we affect, the environment is hardly universal. My environment as an urban North American is quite different from someone living in a rural jungle setting (for example). As such, I am proposing a totally relativistic idea of “environment” that necessitates that work on issues related to ecology and the environment consider boundaries both political and spatial between the body and the given environment. Perhaps more apt way to describe these boundaries could be our respective levels of insulation from the world that surrounds us.


Jamie & Elizabeth:

“…hybrid works create zones of contact between things that are usually kept apart (because of habits of thinking, seeing, or acting). They activate spaces between and make them available for making something else than the same old categories.”

I love the way you’ve articulated this and I’d like to add that those points of contact are where in our recent work we have been focused. For us the points of contact are where sparks occur. Our recent work is hybrid in that it combines or makes use of multiple normally segregated systems of knowledge in order to draw out or shine a light on ideas that don’t naturally emerge for those systems of knowledge in isolation. In the exhibit we are currently installing, we combine geologic and ethnographic images to place human time in the context of geologic time.

Heart and Solar Plexus

Jamie and Elizabeth - I really appreciated your digital pinholes of my Sierra Cloud Chamber. Mainly because the first idea for that piece was to close it into a dark space with a door and white floor with an aperture in the roof, so it would have worked like a camera obscura, projecting clouds onto the floor. However, its location was going to be the roof of NMA in August and it would have been so hot in there that you could never have stayed long enough to see a cloud. So to have you turn that around and produce pinhole images of what might have been, was very apt. Thank you.

and Caryn - I think you are right about the solar plexus - that is exactly where that connection lodges. It was what I meant by pit of the stomach. It is also the place of the centre of gravity/balance where you are most rooted to the earth. When things later begin to hit you emotionally, and this comes after, then that feeling moves closer to the heart.

I read about an interesting study done on the heart and and it seems that the brain and the heart are intimately connected. People who have heart transplants weirdly seem to take on the interests and skills of the donor. The solar plexus however is a visceral, survival type connection which then seems to feed into the brain and heart.

Maybe the need to categorise art into terms like hybridity is quite an American thing to do, because I haven't registered it happening here in Europe, although to tell you the truth I don't have big connections to museums over here. I think however there is more of a presumption here that things overlap. Tate Modern are for ever changing their categories of how they display their collections. but the science terms are definitely the metaphors of the moment.

Working/Hybrid

an image from my "found footage" film, "Perchance"

As Bill observed in his provocation week one, science-derived terms like “hybridity” are appropriated loosely by artists. I have been using it in the way Susan uses it—as a way of naming the “slash” in my self-description and in my tool kit and my techniques: I’m an artist/educator/gardener. I work in film/video/photography/sound design. My pieces are experimental/narrative or experimental/documentary or documentary/memoir. In a multi-mediated world, the tools I use to create media converge, to some degree. I still have one foot firmly planted in the analog world, and hope to continue to work analogically as long as the tools and materials hold out.

Does this matter? I think so. I’m interested in the ways in which the analog world still engages my whole self. I’m much more conscious as I work in the film world of the importance of my hands, of working with my hands, and of the ways my body moves in space. I’m interested in working in film with students, teaching them handmade film techniques, and in having them experience media-making while working with their hands, placing them directly on the materials. Students could then bring this new (old) knowledge with them (back) into the digital realm in which they are already comfortable. Even directionality shifts. Another hybridity.

I appreciated Chris’s articulation of an artistic process. In his week 2-post, Chris writes:

So the way I work is very instinctive, I often start with what I can only describe as a feeling in the pit of my stomach. That is me feeling instantly connected to something. Then you work out how you will go about doing something about this. I.e. method, approach, material, form etc. It is all quite non verbal. Sometimes there is the germ of an idea, but it is missing a bit, so you may put it aside and wait awhile. At some point that last piece of the jigsaw will drop into place; you see something or read something. Maybe its an idea about the material to use, or the way to work. Whatever, it completes a circle whereby everything is related and whole. Then you can make the work.

I’ve been struggling to articulate this process myself. For me, the feeling isn’t in the “pit of my stomach” but rather in my solar plexus, under my heart. It feels like a physical “buzz,” and I try to foster it. It is the buzz that leads, for me.

As a pair of crazy philosophers remind me:

This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.
– Deleuze and Guattari , A Thousand Plateaus

If it is indeed a buzz, an instant connection, a flow, something non-verbal, we reach for different tools and materials to express or connect with it. Is that “hybridity”? Maybe. The word we used to use was “eclectic.” Sometimes, we reached for language metaphors. The scientific analogies, the appropriations, have their day now because it is these metaphors that seem most urgent, most relevant, perhaps even most fundable.

Feeling the Reality of Relation

Hi everybody,

One of the questions that Susan asks is: "Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?"

I guess I see the crossing, mixing, and blending of disciplines, styles, etc. as a means, not as an end. And I think that as a means, hybridity is extremely relevant to issues that are shaping conversations in Art + Environment.

Mixing Chris's and Susan's postings :-), I'll try to explain why I think so:

It seems to me that you can use the term "hybridity" to talk about "mixing" materials, genres, even perspectives. But you can also use it to emphasize the growing recognition that no categories, materials, identities, or perspectives are ever purely themselves: every thing is deeply interconnected with everything else--all there is is "mutual contamination" and "co-shaping." (I think Chris is talking about this in his first post in week 2.) Wherever we, as humans and as artists, draw lines that separate this from that, juxtapose this to that, compare and contrast this to that--we are temporarily, and purposefully, "punctuating" the otherwise continuous flow of the world's unfolding. It's what we do in order to act and make things in the world.

So for me, the idea of hybridity and the works called "hybrid" speak to more than mixing things already defined as things (media, materials, styles). Hybrid works are also saying something about the impossibility of hermetically sealed boundaries and the ways that categories leak and spill over. They draw our attention to what Chris says is his "first step" as an artist: "an instinctive connection with no labels"-- a dipping into that continuous, uncategorized flow of the world's becoming.

At their best, I think, hybrid works create zones of contact between things that are usually kept apart (because of habits of thinking, seeing, or acting). They activate spaces between and make them available for making something else than the same old categories. Hybrid works can do what Chris says is such a marvel: they can help us NOT to miss what we mostly miss, namely, how stuff is interrelated.

For someone like me who is working in media studies--hybridity is a hot topic. Media scholars are pointing out that "new" media are never wholly new because they "re-mediate" old media. Digital cameras re-mediate film cameras re-media camera obscuras, etc. Each new medium comments on, replaces, or reproduces earlier ones by borrowing, repurposing, refashioning (encyclopedias on the internet, art museums on CD-ROMs, digital scans of polaroids).

I've been making digital camera obscura photographs by taking digital photos of images that appear on the screen inside a homemade camera obscura. It's a hybrid camera--part camera obscura, part canon coolpix. It creates a hybrid image: part analog projection of light's passage-through the world and part digital record of that passage.

Here's an artist statement about the results:

"Digital camera obscuras depict a world in which every thing is shaped and reshaped by all that surrounds it. Subjects appear as “in-relation” rather than as “in-themselves.”

Here are a couple of digital camera obscuras that I took of Chris Dury's installation at the Nevada Museum of Art last October/November.


What I hope for with this experiment--and what I think might be the power and relevance of hybridity--is that instead of just being additive (digital + analogue, or old camera + new camera, or smoke + video) --hybrid practices can generate entirely new, previously unexperienced sensations (and actions) of interrelatedness. The desire, to quote one media studies philosopher, is "the felt reality of relation."

Would love to hear what you think!!

relationship and interconnectedness

Hi Susan,

Its interesting to hear from curators and teachers because you have to make sense of what artists do. For myself, as an artist, I would never start with a label, like 'shall I make a hybrid work?'. For me the world is about relationship and so you explore connections. Always you start with what is here now and you come towards this with who you are now with all your history, culture and biases. You are the product of own indoctrination, so you always see the world through that veil. I guess it's important to see that. Nobody and no thing is an isolated entity, we are all bits of stuff related to other stuff, and half the time we don't see the connections. But it is how stuff is interrelated which is interesting, its interesting because we mostly miss it all, but when we see it and recognise it then it is worth drawing out in a work. That is a kind of marvel, really.

So the way I work is very instinctive, I often start with what I can only describe as a feeling in the pit of my stomach. That is me feeling instantly connected to something. Then you work out how you will go about doing something about this. I.e. method, approach, material, form etc. It is all quite non verbal. Sometimes there is the germ of an idea, but it is missing a bit, so you may put it aside and wait awhile. At some point that last piece of the jigsaw will drop into place; you see something or read something. Maybe its an idea about the material to use, or the way to work. Whatever, it completes a circle whereby everything is related and whole. Then you can make the work.

Later that piece fits into the unfolding story of your work and you can begin to view it objectively, even give it a label, see that it relates to and adds to a particular area of your work. Putting things into categories is how we try to make sense of the world and how artists can objectively relate one work to another and see how what they are doing might relate to others in the field. these are all words and thoughts after the event. The first step is a instinctive connection with no labels. Its like a kind of floating into something, but at the same time very tense and excited.

That's how it is with me anyway.

Chris.



'Howling at the Universe' a homage to Kurt Schwitters - spore print, screen printed in porridge on black paper.




'Shattered Peace, Broken promises' - video stills from a film of the smoke from a sage bundle, effected by the sound of an explosion.

March 12-19, 2009

I have been thinking about my turn to post a provocation this week and would like to pick up the strand begun by Bill Gilbert in his post and open up the idea of “hybridity” to more conversation. On one hand, this is another term appropriated from science, so it makes some sense to follow Bill Fox’s week 1 provocation. But beyond that, of the five terms I have been working with at the Walker Art Center, this one has given me the most trouble conceptually. While a hybrid is at its root a biological term about mixing species, the post colonial cultural discourse around this term has taken over and made it much more problematic. In the Elements/Principles of Contemporary Art materials that I have been developing, I have attempted to bring the discussion to a point that might engage high school students, but fear that I am over simplifying the very complex idea of cultural hybridity in a globalized world.

Even the Center for Art + Environment is a hybrid form of institution (note the “+”). Of course, ecology and environmental work transcends borders or cultural boundaries. Or does it? Is this practice really above the global issues of cultural hybridity? How do artists who are interested in the environment address their own cultural histories, roots, and biases -- and those of the people they encounter -- as they work globally?

I also have been aware that another way of thinking about hybridity is emerging (or has been emerging for a long time) in the practice of artists. I found myself noting in many of the introductions for this conversation that we describe ourselves with a blend of interests, professions, and pursuits. (artist / author / educator /scholar / researcher / scientist / writer / musician / architect / printmaker / activist / etc.). We all seem to hybrid-ize our practices in our artistic and professional work and, further, in how we craft our lives. Mixing media is common among artistic practice today, but this seems to go further to impact how we view ourselves as creative individuals. Do you think this is a valuable conversation to have, or are we at the point where it is no longer relevant to include our choices of media and techniques when we express an idea or theory? Do you think of yourself as a hybrid artist? Is it necessary to cross, mix and blend disciplines in order to be truly relevant in our practice?