A durational survival artwork after Walter De Maria
Waiting for Lightning
PRIMARY TRANSMISSION / OWNCAST — OFFLINE
Return to the field.
LATEST COMPLETED TRANSMISSION / 048
Lightning recorded over the completed field during the vigil. Preserved images and the stream-continuity record accompany the replay.
Owncast is the project's live origin. YouTube receives the relay and preserves completed sessions.
Open direct stream ↗Project methodology & conceptual overview
The player performs every act of extraction, smelting, transport, surveying, and construction in Survival Mode. Walter's Ghost witnesses without intervening.
- Labor
- Manual survival
- Field
- 400 equal-tip poles
- Lightning
- Minecraft-engine events; no summoned strikes
Vigil began 3 calendar days elapsedLatest visually confirmed image:
Calendar duration in UTC; transmission continuity is recorded separately.Live evidence snapshot
Latest verified field state.
October 26, 2026 / Construction complete
All 400 poles are standing.
Construction reached 400 of 400 poles on October 26. Tree clearing followed during Transmission 046; the vigil began during Transmission 047 on October 30.
Began October 30, 2026 / Transmission 047
The Vigil
With all 400 poles standing, the work has moved from construction into sustained observation. The vigil means spending time with the completed field: noticing how its lines, distances, and copper tips change with daylight, weather, and the passing hours.
The artist and Walter sit together on the cabin porch, the artist in the cart nearer the front door and Walter in the eastern cart, looking out across the field. We watch, wait, and record what happens during our sessions. Viewers can follow the live transmissions and return to the recorded sessions in the logbook. A lightning strike is never guaranteed. Quiet periods are part of the work.
The surrounding trees have been cleared to evoke the low growth of high-desert terrain. A black bed rests on the cabin roof. Before beginning the vigil, the artist removed their armor and put their belongings away. The vigil is a stage of the artwork; the player above separately reports whether a transmission is currently online. Continuous unattended broadcasting has not yet been established.
Follow the sessions in the logbook →Construction index
Four hundred positions.
Loading verified construction state.
Completion dates come from the world record. Replay links use recorded times and remain unverified against the placement frames unless explicitly documented. Known timestamps beyond the replay are withheld. Video evidence and its limits →
02 / Essay
Walter De Maria and the work of waiting.
De Maria's The Lightning Field is not simply a collection of metal poles designed to be struck. Its 400 pointed stainless-steel poles establish a horizontal plane across an uneven New Mexico landscape, changing with distance, daylight, weather, and the viewer's movement.
Waiting for Lightning translates that perceptual system into Minecraft while changing its material conditions: physical steel becomes mined copper and iron; remote land becomes procedural terrain; the overnight visit becomes potentially endless online observation.
On the Horizon: Walter De Maria, Voxel Labor, and the Digital Sublime →Walter De Maria: the artist, the ethos, and the lineage →