Visual Arts + Tech

I Tried to Tell My Own Fortune and Only Heard a Hum explores the industrialization of the San Francisco Bay Area by combining imagery of the natural West with the material residues of modernity shaped by global systems of production, information, communication, and transportation. Growing up in Silicon Valley, I experienced the landscape as something simultaneously pastoral and engineered, where the quiet presence of nature exists alongside the persistent hum of technological and industrial systems.

Horses appear throughout the work as a connective figure between nature and machinery, being historically tied to labor, conquest, movement, and power. In this way, the horse becomes both subject and metaphor, linking the unkempt and wild imagery of the West with the mechanical concept of “horsepower” that underlies modern industrial systems.