I spent portions of my career inside organizations built around measurement, communication, and large-scale systems. Decades later, I find myself returning to similar questions through art: how attention is allocated, how feedback travels, and how decisions emerge from incomplete information.
State Of The Union began as a simple question: how do individuals, institutions, and societies make decisions when every signal insists it is the most important signal?
The series borrows the visual language of dashboards, diagrams, control panels, feedback systems, and wayfinding maps. These images are not illustrations of specific events. They are observations about attention, calibration, participation, verification, and the conditions under which complex systems learn.
While the project emerged during a period of heightened political, technological, and cultural turbulence, its concerns extend beyond any single administration, ideology, or moment in time. The cards explore recurring human challenges: how attention is allocated, how reality is measured, how assumptions are tested, how knowledge is shared, and how disagreement contributes to collective intelligence.
Each card presents a small proposition. Taken together, they form a sequence moving from individual discernment toward shared responsibility.
Machine weather is calibrating. Humans are on high alert, in crisis response. Yet, we’re becoming more savvy; going back to basic instinctual survival internal responses. Perhaps there is a light forthcoming.
Concept and authorship by Carolyn Parker.
Developed through a process of observation, image-making, writing, and critical dialogue. Midjourney, Adobe Creative Cloud, ChatGPT (OpenAI), and Google Gemini served as generative and analytical tools throughout the project. Primary source materials, interpretation, sequencing, and final editorial decisions by the artist.
Series available as works on paper or as a printed zine.
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