Artist Statement

To Those Who Create the Future investigates the impact of lithium mining, a key material in the clean energy debate. This includes economies based on extraction, the ongoing impact of colonialism, the role of Silicon Valley, and the spread of politicized ideas online.

The project was filmed during 2024 on location in the world’s largest lithium mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the otherworldly, lithium-rich Salton Sea in California, and oil fields across the Mojave desert.

The large color field works combine the fascinating colors from landscapes changed by mining. Whitcraft uses a lens-based process that affects the image in a similar way that lithium mining changes the earth’s surface. The video and landscape photographs employ modified drone and cinema cameras sensitive to light beyond human perception. 

Whitcraft's art reflects lithium mining's impact on the earth—distorting landscapes, mirroring the land's physical alteration from lithium extraction, and visually recording the environmental impact—prompting reflection on human activity and nature.

Artist Statement

Davey Whitcraft investigates perception, world-making and notions of the natural through artistic collaborations with synthetic intelligence.

His work excavates the known world in search of the sublime and presents novel visual constructions which reveal the intricacies and nuances of human perception. Whitcraft seeks not to replicate the natural world, but to supplement it by leveraging the infinite possibilities of light, alternative geometries and physical properties afforded by the digital realm.

In Looking at the Sky, he combines video, photography and custom software to explore abstractions of natural landscapes, sky and sea – revealing a unique mode of native technological creativity.

The video pieces and large scale colorfield works explore a new mode of working with landscape. The works propose a world that operates with different physics, impossible geometries and alternate geo- planetary arrangements. Working with parameters collaboratively created by Whitcraft and a General Adversarial Network (GAN), the results transfigure current physical principles to produce landscape photographs with spherically arranged horizons and mesmerizing video seascapes.

Artist Bio

Davey Whitcraft works across film, sculpture, and installation to document “Sites of Accumulation” — places with high concentrations of psychological, economic, material, or political energy.

Whitcraft examines sites where complex entanglements of complex entanglements of technological spelunking, biodiversity risk, social media discourse, economic anomalies, climate change, and geopolitical fiction are all revealed.

Drawing from contemporary philosophy, and borrowing scientific research methods from geology, anthropology, and sociology, Whitcraft  challenges the traditional separation between rational and irrational and his work brings to light the unconscious dimensions of social, political, and geological events.

Deploying modified cinema cameras and drones to ‘see’ outside of the visible light spectrum, and special radios to ‘listen’ to not only wi-fi signals but also background radiation from space, his light and sound installations operate at the limits of human perception.

His work has been included in museums internationally such as Los Angeles MOCA, SFMOMA, LA Architecture + Design Museum, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Godwin-Ternbach Museum NY, Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia and gallery exhibitions including Themes+Projects, Minnesota Street Projects San Francisco, Subliminal Projects Los Angeles, Rietveld Art Academy Amsterdam, Netherlands, One-Off Moving Image Festival Copenhagen Denmark, Yami-ichi Brussels, Belgium, London West Gallery and the Leap Second Festival, Norway.

Whitcraft is based in Los Angeles and holds a PhD in Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought from EGS, Saas-Fee, Switzerland and an MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles.