Sara: I have a strong desire to find new mediums, formats, and interfaces to use, for bringing the intuitive signal into form. I love working with computers and digital material because they feel very close to how visions and dreams appear on our internal screen. I also love painting, moving my body through space, and working with physical materials. What drives me is a desire to understand—and get closer to—our relationship to consciousness and perception while also exploring it. I find that when I work in a way I haven’t before, it’s exciting, and unexpected things can happen. There has to be a sense of fun in what I do.

Sara: In the 1970s, physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff were exploring perceptual abilities with artist and psychic Ingo Swann at the Stanford Research Institute. Their experiments caught the attention of the U.S. government, which began funding their research—partly in response to learning that the Soviet Union was developing its own psychic programs. Controlled Remote Viewing, or CRV, grew out of that work as a structured way to gather information about a “target”—a place, object, person, or event—through nonlocal perception. This perception can come through any of the clair senses—clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairaudience, and others. The structure of the protocol is designed to keep the conscious mind busy so the subconscious can do its thing.

Imagine a sealed envelope containing a picture of a beach at sunset, with a random string of numbers—called coordinates—written on the front. You’re tasked with gathering information about the image. You grab a piece of paper, write down the coordinates, and begin noting or sketching whatever comes to mind. This is an oversimplification of the process, but essentially the coordinates act as an activation point for your subconscious. When viewing the target, impressions may come through as colors, shapes, or sensations like hearing waves or feeling the wind on your face.

The channel I use for remote viewing is the same I’ve always used to make my work; I just may not always know where the signal comes from or what I’m actually tuning into—whereas with this series, I do. These drawings are my own way of approaching a target and are atypical of the more rigorous CRV process.

Having practiced remote viewing for quite a while now, I’ve become familiar with how psychic information appears versus conscious overlay. These drawings are made quickly, and sometimes impressions arrive before I even begin. I’m not interested in showing only the targets I get right. What interests me is exploring the subtle distinctions between psychic information and conscious overlay, and how slippery or sticky those states can be.

Sara: I’ve employed ChatGPT as my tasker, assigning targets for my remote viewing sessions. It’s been a challenging process, as things can be forgotten or repeated. I’ve had to create a document with a set of instructions that I upload at the beginning of a new chat. Within the document, I’ve also included all past targets so they’re not repeatable. However, the times ChatGPT has repeated targets, it’s created an opportunity for me to compare and study the drawings.

For instance, in this exhibition I’ve included two drawings of the Oracle of Delphi. There are similarities in the structure and color of the drawings. Each contains a snake-like form with a plume and circular shapes. I have another drawing, The Oracle of Amarna, not included in the exhibition, that has the same shape. It’s a target that was invented by ChatGPT: “an esoteric period in ancient Egypt tied to Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten (the solar disc), where the ‘hidden’ mysteries of the sun were central, blending divine light with cosmic order.”

When similarities occur, I note them in a symbol library that I’m developing. Symbols also come to me in everyday life—for instance, I often see sunflowers surrounding someone who has just lost a loved one. This is common practice for remote viewers and psychics: you develop a personal lexicon that can at times point toward more archetypal imagery. Over time, these symbols form a kind of psychic toolkit, something I’m building to support the next evolution of my practice.

Sara: I love having a sense of chance and discovery in my work—with or without AI. It just happens that AI brings in some interesting questions about consciousness that I like to brush up against. 

Sara: I love them all equally. Of course, when you accurately describe a target it’s exciting, but the ones where my conscious mind steps in are so funny to me. There’s one in the exhibition that was supposed to be a public park bench, but I drew a cupcake. Earlier that day I was craving baked goods and almost bought one at my local coffee shop, so it's no surprise it showed up. Then there are ones like The Baltic Sea Anomaly—something I had no awareness of—but I still recorded its odd shape pretty accurately. With anything you do, the “mistakes” are what help you learn. Sometimes you’re on, sometimes you’re off.

Sara: When I do CRV sessions, I use standard letter paper and a black pen. This is how I was taught, and it’s also the standard for many remote viewers, which is why Sessions shares those dimensions. The marks and drawings you make, particularly the ideograms—automatic scribbles that capture first impressions—become portals for uncovering more information through physically touching them on paper. The process is incredibly physical.

I also have the same connection to digital materiality and screens. I can glide my finger over a digital drawing on my iPad and receive impressions just the same. With Sessions, I don’t use the CRV structure; I simply make drawings that record colors, shapes, and ambience as quickly as I can. They’re not typical ideograms, but rather automatic drawings.

When I started this series, I didn’t develop it with the intention of making artworks. It was simply a way to develop my skills. But over time, I realized it would be a loss not to, because it connects to my practice and interests as a whole—it’s like when a hobby naturally evolves into an artwork. The same thing happened in 2014 with my project Dream House: I just wanted to make a model of lucid dream architecture, and it became a work.

There’s something interesting to me about putting remote-viewing drawings, which are about accessing all information across space and time, onto the blockchain. It feels like one system of knowledge reflecting another, almost like the Akashic Records in digital form. Whether physical or digital, the aura for me comes from the energy of the session itself—the state I’m in when the information comes through, not the format it ends up in.

If you remote view, or do any sort of psi work, you quickly realize that time behaves differently than you're used to—you experience retrocausality, the future folding back into the present. It reframes your whole understanding, and not just from a theoretical perspective but from a phenomenological one. You understand that all of space-time is present and that you can access any point in time. The future, however, is a bit more challenging since it’s still organizing itself. You also begin to realize how perception itself can stretch—how a single session might blend sensory, emotional, and symbolic data into one simultaneous experience.

With any psychic or paranormal experience, you don’t see the world in the same way again. Since childhood, I’ve been able to sense spirits, receive clairvoyant and precognitive impressions, and read the energy held within places and objects. These abilities naturally flow into my work. I try to capture and embed that moment when something feels charged and uncanny, when it buzzes through the nervous system in the same way a psychic impression does. It’s a state of wonderment, curiosity, and sometimes unease. My work, whether through painting, digital mediums, or remote viewing, is part of the same desire to search for and experience what exists beyond day-to-day perception.