Dakota Clearwater LaCroix · Curious Lightning · multimedia artist
It always begins with curiosity.
Curiosity is an invitation.
Something sparks. An interest catches like an ember, and if you tend it, it becomes a fire people can gather around: a walk, a film, a song, a night where the room becomes the instrument. Every map I've followed runs out somewhere, usually right where the old mapmakers drew the dragons. That's where the treasure tends to be. It keeps leading somewhere I didn't expect, which usually turns out to be right here.
The Greeks have a word for doing something with your whole soul: meraki. Add a little play, the kind that forgets to come in when the streetlights come on, and that's how I like to make things.
Curious is attention and intention, the question carried. Lightning is the moment it lands in the body. Between the two, something emerges that neither could make alone. Alma Analog is the ground under my feet; MC Eco Freq, the frequency humming underneath it all.
Field notes, beyond the map
- 2001
Hike for Hope
On foot from Key West to the Gaspé for the better part of a year, as co-founder of Hike for Hope. A scruffy brown dog walked part of the way. The story became Stinky and the Android, typed on a manual typewriter, a portable plastic Safari picked up on the walk in Maine. Featured in Backpacker, National Geographic Online and The Boston Globe.
What happens when you walk the length of a continent?
- 2005
Suicide Tom
A film built from my father's 8mm home movies. Director and editor. 25th IFP Marketplace and the 58th Edinburgh Film Festival.
What do old reels remember that we forget?
- 2010s
Curious Lightning, on the air
The podcast and radio show I created, produced and hosted, on KTRT 97.5 FM in Washington's Methow Valley. Feminist poets, beekeepers, coffee makers, former NASA scientists and more. From FEMA disaster zones to the Cascade Mountains: mental health, creativity, resilience, and our connection to nature and our true nature.
What does a community sound like while it rebuilds?
- 2010s
In Their Voices
An artist residency with TwispWorks: months of interviews and hikes up to remote fire lookouts with more than a dozen former Forest Service crew members, woven with fire, air, water and land into a feature-length audio documentary for TwispWorks. It aired on FM radio, played at listening stations, and is permanently archived by the Initiative for Rural Innovation & Stewardship.
What does a valley sound like when its people tell it?
- 2020
Emergency to Emergence
Sterling College's first podcast: heart-centered conversations with artists, authors, activists and educators about eco-social emergencies. I shaped the first season's tone, sound and story, and directed, edited and co-wrote it.
What grows out of an emergency?
- 2022
Head, Hand & Heart
An artist residency with Oika and the Maria Mitchell Association: a time-traveling sound walk on Nantucket that I created, produced and researched, co-created with Cinema Wood as co-writer and performer. With a robot narrator named AWMI. Global shortlist, WLC sound walk. A companion installation at the Maria Mitchell gallery.
What lies just beyond our senses?
- now
AWMI Wayfinder: The One Who Rises Up
A live journey in the making, from the headlines to the heart of the land, and into a relationship beyond all stories. An old analog wayfinder with a boombox for a heart helps a girl named Fern find her way beneath the surface of the screens, and out onto the mountain on her own two feet. Meanwhile, I carry an old singing bowl to the summits of the Adirondack High Peaks and record a frequency at each one.
What else is singing?
Where AWMI first spoke Head, Hand & Heart
A playful, time-traveling sound walk through Nantucket, narrated by a hybrid robot named AWMI-M3-4170, which I created, produced and researched, and co-created with co-writer and performer Cinema Wood. It weaves local soundscapes, Native voices, astronomy and island history into one walk home through head and hand to the heart.
A companion installation at the Maria Mitchell gallery gathered sound from the observatory, the cranberry bogs and Nantucket Bay.
“Evoked a sense of wonder and awe.”Felicity F.
“It was true poetry.”Emily A.
“Learning about her stirred something in me to reach up and be more.”Jean P.
The constellation
Over the years the points of light have added up: a ten-month walk for Oxfam America, a film from my father's 8mm reels that found its way to Edinburgh, a radio show from a valley rebuilding after fire, voices carried down from the fire lookouts, a podcast for Sterling College, a time-traveling sound walk on Nantucket, a voice heard on Investigation Discovery and in museum halls, Rumi danced to live music. Connect them, and a shape appears.
Come a little closer and you can hear it: the warm crackle of Alma Analog, the field-recorded frequencies of MC Eco Freq, and AWMI, a hybrid of old analog heart and new circuitry, still finding her way.
Curious connections
Every project starts with curiosity and a map, and the map is never what it turns out to be. On the long walk, the plan was nine connecting trails all the way to Cap Gaspé. Instead we found ourselves pushing a friend in a wheelchair, and found more pain, more awe and more kindness than any trail could have held. That keeps happening. So I stay a student: of story with Robert McKee, of voice with Kristin Linklater and Sunday Muse, and of every place that has let me slow down to the speed of feet and pedals and listen with the head, the ears and the heart.
I work with people and places who feel the same pull: museums, colleges, islands, valleys, festivals, musicians. Say hello
Some inspirations
Shooting stars, bikes, dogs named Alma, thunder and lightning storms, the sound of moving water, Bread and Puppet, Buster Keaton, Laurie Anderson, Rick Rubin, Bobby McFerrin, Maria Mitchell, Snowflake Bentley, Lao Tzu, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, Tom Robbins, Anthony Bourdain, Charles Bukowski, Robin Williams, old school hip-hop, Gregorian chant, The Little Prince, Winnie-the-Pooh, On the Road, The Alchemist, ocean tides, and everyone who walked in 2001.