So... I turned 50.

And to mark the bi-centennial journey around the sun, two weeks in Montréal with some of my favorite humans seemed exactly right.

Montréal was the city I chose as home after graduating high school, and the place where the possibilities of who I might become first began to emerge. Returning at this particular threshold felt irresistible.

Much of the past year went into making those two weeks possible: finding enough places for everyone to stay, putting enough pieces in place to leave my working life at home instead of packing it in my carry-on, and, perhaps most importantly, practicing the increasingly radical art of moving slowly enough to notice what was happening in my inner and outer worlds.

However, I still packed a mental to-do list.

Earlier in August, after a glorious stretch of barely engaging with social media (excellent for my mental health; also, apparently, for my garden), I had reluctantly accepted that disappearing from the internet isn't a particularly effective way to let people know what you're doing.

So before I left, I dutifully recorded videos and made a little plan to edit and post them while I was away.

But every time I considered stepping out of whatever was actually happening in front of me to produce a consumable virtual bite, I kept having the same thought:

You worked ALL YEAR to be here. So BE HERE.

And so I remained present.

Apart from a birthday message, the newsfeed got the “ghost.”

And something happened that I suspect most of us recognize from those increasingly rare moments when we stop feeding the algorithm long enough to become completely absorbed in the lives we're actually living:

The world expanded in orders of magnitude relative to the attention I gave it.

In many ways, the trip was a wash, rinse, repeat of the things I already love most about Montréal: biking the mountain, absorbing the energy of the city and its extraordinary public art, practicing at a yoga studio I'd discovered earlier this summer, this time with all of my friends.

But repetition didn't make any of it smaller.

Attention made it richer.

Chance conversations became friendships. Familiar places developed new layers.

Relationships formed that are already opening doors to future collaborations and giving me even more reasons to return.

I just needed to be present long enough for what was already there to reveal more of itself.

Which has left me thinking a lot about attention.

We carry these astonishingly powerful tools everywhere we go, and so often use them in ways that make the enormous, complicated, miraculous world immediately surrounding us feel smaller.

But what if we used them to do the opposite?

What if our screens could transport us back INTO our world?

That question happens to sit at the heart of something Hanif and I have been quietly working on since May.

It's called In the Flesh.

For those of you who have followed my work for years, In the Flesh isn't so much a departure as an evolution of my entire body of knowledge and work: a synthesis of what I've spent decades learning, teaching and making, combined with Hanif's visual, musical and technological artistry in a way that neither of us could create alone.

For most of my adult life, I've been asking people to become curious about the body they inhabit. To look beneath the surface. To notice sensation, structure, adaptation and interdependence.

And perhaps most importantly, to experience the body not as an object to be managed or corrected, but as a living world worthy of our attention.

In the Flesh takes that inquiry out of the classroom and builds a world you can walk inside.

Working together as HD, we're creating a large-scale immersive art experience that explores the human body not as an isolated machine, but as an ecosystem within ecosystems.

One of those environments explores fascia and mycelium: two vast connective networks, one running throughout our bodies, the other beneath the world around us.

Rather than explaining that relationship on a wall, we're building a tunnel you can move through.

An early visualization of one of the worlds we're beginning to build.

As you move through the tunnel, an abstracted world of connective tissue transforms into the branching networks of mycelium beneath the forest floor.

Other environments explore our lungs and forests, vascular systems and waterways, neural networks, and the microbiome as an ecosystem unto itself.

Underneath all of them is the same question:

What happens when we stop thinking of the human body as something separate from nature and begin recognizing the systems and relationships we share with the living world around us?

This isn't just an anatomy exhibit where you walk from one informational panel to the next.

We're placing you inside it. (Think Magic School Bus, without the bus.)

Light, sound, projection, movement, sculpture and technology turn these ideas into environments to experience rather than simply explain.

And instead of asking visitors to put their phones away in order to be present, we're asking them to use those phones differently.

QR codes take visitors deeper into the science and stories behind what they're experiencing. Augmented reality reveals worlds beyond the scale of ordinary perception.

The screen isn't the destination. It's the portal.

Technology becomes another way of paying attention: a tool for becoming more curious about what's happening around and within us all the time.

Which brings me right back to Montréal.

What I was protecting there wasn't my vacation from technology.

It was my attention.

And perhaps that's what In the Flesh is really interested in too: helping us become present long enough for what was already there to reveal more of itself.

In the Flesh is being developed for its initial exhibition at the Pacific Grove Art Center, but from the beginning we've imagined a life for it beyond a single exhibition.

Individual environments can travel, evolve, or find future homes in museums, hospitals, educational institutions and other public spaces.

The project is ambitious. Which is another way of saying that we cannot, and don't particularly want to, build it in isolation.

Since my return, we've begun sitting down with people and organizations throughout our community.

Those conversations are already changing the project: bringing research, expertise, introductions, technology, unexpected ideas, potential future homes and financial support into the mix.

And that's why I wanted to tell you about it before I went back to shouting into the algorithm.

Because this mailing list has quietly become its own extraordinary ecosystem over the years.

Beyond the fact that you're interested enough in what I believe in to keep reading these emails, I don't know what worlds you inhabit, what knowledge or connections you carry, or what part of this project might make something in your brain light up.

And from what I've learned, it's better to initiate a conversation than to assume.

​Explore In the Flesh →​

Here is our pitch deck if you'd like to take a deeper look at what we're creating.

And if something you see makes you think:

I know someone you should talk to.

You need to know about this.

I want to be involved.

Or simply:

Tell me more.

Hit reply.

Some of the most valuable things coming into this project aren't things we knew to ask for.

They're connections.

And for a project about the invisible networks connecting one living thing to another, that feels rather appropriate.

Maybe the best way to build something In the Flesh is exactly this way:

person to person.

Also, thanks for following me down the rabbit hole. Turns out, these tunnels lead to extraordinary spaces.

More soon. There is a LOT more to show you.

With love,

Domini Anne

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