A durational survival artwork after Walter De Maria
Waiting for Lightning
When the field is offline, the player remains a threshold: the next transmission has not begun.
Open the YouTube channel ↗Project methodology & conceptual overview
The player performs every act of extraction, smelting, transport, surveying, and construction in Survival. Walter's Ghost witnesses without intervening.
Read the full essay →Construction index
Four hundred positions.
None occupied.
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 →