That first of all feeds into what I do and secondly, it is emblematic of what I hope to achieve through what I do. That is to say all those conversations that are a result of it are the sorts of conversations that I think are the ultimate, most valuable by-product of what I'm doing.

Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.

My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.

We are not evolved really very well to be able to understand or to be able to work with and grapple with technologies that we have.

Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.

I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.

...there's no reason why scholarship can't be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.