A durational survival artwork after Walter De Maria
Waiting for Lightning
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
Live evidence snapshot
Latest verified field state.
Construction index
Four hundred positions.
None complete.
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 →