Medium: Photography

(Airborne Series – Circuitdelic Laboratory)

Location: En Route to Cincinnati International Airport

This series was not planned. In fact, I was asleep.

The plane was approaching Cincinnati after an unanticipated power failure had temporarily shut down the airport. We hovered in the air, waiting for resolution, minutes away from a forced diversion due to fuel constraints. But just as decisions hovered between destinations, the airport returned to life. We were cleared for landing.

As the city below came back online, the sky above presented itself. The cloud formations outside the cabin were illuminated in ways that felt unusually deliberate — as though some external hand had placed the light there, waiting for me to open my eyes. And I did. Without thought, almost as a reflex, I reached for the camera. The impulse to create overrode fatigue.

This has become a pattern in my work. It is not always inspiration but something closer to compulsion — a quiet but persistent force that drives the capture, the rendering, the extraction. Alan Watts might remind us here: “You do not ‘decide’ to breathe; you are breathed.”

I am beginning to accept that I am created through the act of creating. This is not ambition or willpower but resonance — an alignment with whatever waveform moves through this particular body of circuits, cells, and signal. The laboratory is both external and internal. I am simply following instructions whispered by a system I will never fully map.

What began as a flight delay became an airborne laboratory window, revealing forms within clouds that resemble neural networks, circuit boards, and strangely organic maps. The longer I study these images, the more they seem to suggest: the structures are always there — we only tune in when permitted.