My work as an Artist-In-Residence at the SETI Institute during 2015-2016 was a continuation and expansion of an ongoing multi-disciplinary inquiry in art that began initially in 2002. For the first decade, it consisted of a daily self-investigation presented in the time-based format of the Gregorian calendar, drawing upon media sources as a means of self-reflection. This evolved into a broader exploration of the dyadic relationship, a foundation of interaction in our species in 2012 when I began, via correspondence, to invite a subject each month to share some thoughts of interest to them with me. These messages, filtered through the prism of psychoanalytical principles, were then visualized as daily elements of a calendar. In bringing this effort of visualizing the subject’s mind in the matrix of time to a group of scientists at the Institute, one of whose missions was to explore the possibilities of contact with extraplanetary biological life, my goals were twofold. I hoped to both collaborate in this manner with this fascinating cohort while bringing to bear the essential ingredient of transference as a bedrock of interaction and one that would facilitate the development of hypothetical extraterrestrial relationships. While the resultant artworks are the manifest outcome of this process, they are also records in images of the mind of each subject in the course of their respective month while simultaneously expressing the dynamics of the evolution of each situational relationship that facilitated their creation. The results visually reflect the broad range and enriching potential of the latter in preparing humanity for what is to come.

January 2015: Jill Tarter

February 2015: Petrus Jenniskens

March 2015: Franck Marchis

April 2015: David Black

May 2015: Oana Marcu

June 2015: Seth Shostak

July 2015: Mark Showalter

August 2015: Margaret Race

September 2015: Janice Bishop

October 2015: Friedemann Freund

November 2015: Laurance Doyle

December 2015: Jon Jenkins

February 2016: Denise Markonish