HENRY PEIRCE

I've been Christian my whole life, though the past two years of college have helped strengthen my faith immensely. I'm part of a Protestant church, but love learning about traditional Christian history and theology.

For years I've had a fascination with futurism and a sense of technological optimism, and college has challenged a lot of my former beliefs, forcing me to ponder balancing these ideals with my Christian understanding of the world. Though my capability to create, fueled by my dreams and inspirations, has only expanded, it has also changed for the better; and yet I still believe that a realistic, but hopeful sense of optimism can go a long way in the Christian life. Just as you walk freely between Main Street and Tomorrowland, it's okay to dream of humanity's expanse into the stars, while still embracing tradition and understanding the reality of our nature; I believe the tension is both necessary and healthy.

Pursuing my major in Christian Philosophy has not averted my immense love for science either. With currently few STEM classes at my liberal arts college, I keep myself busy studying mainly physics on my own time, and my favorite subject is definitely waves. Being into radio, music production, piano tuning, and studying lightbulbs, waves show up everywhere, so I capture them with microphones, cameras, antennas, and telescopes. Waves make the world go round!

I typically only create when I'm very inspired. It's not that I otherwise can't bring myself to pick up a paint brush or microphone, but rather the thing I end up creating does not include the satisfying phenomenon of having communicated feeling. Luckily, if I'm not furiously busy with school, something is bouncing around in my brain.

My favorite part of creating is incorporating as much meaning, obvious or hidden, into my creation as possible. In my music, for example, that takes the form of meaningful clips of sound, familiar motifs, sometimes even morse code—I've even hidden a spectrogram image in Things Remembered. Making my music tell a story keeps my ideas flowing and causes the project to feel like some relic I'm uncovering from my subconscious, rather than small, arbitrary decisions.

Saying I dabble primarily in any particular field of art feels wrong; rather, I follow whatever medium my idea requires. I've made acrylic and oil paintings, digital art, small sculptures, murals, scale models, wooden things, plastic things, and resin things. 

I am not inherently against AI generation, though I do tend to avoid it in any situation where it is replacing my own creativity; I use it more as a fancy search engine and assistant, and I believe it has great, perhaps even still untapped potential in that area.