On The Other Side of Boredom | Adam Ekberg

Adam Ekberg is a photographer whose work lives in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the George Eastman Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Worcester Art Museum. His solo exhibition Minor Spectacles ran at the George Eastman Museum in 2023.

Adam and I met years ago when our kids were in forest school together in rural New Jersey — one of those places where you sign a waiver so your preschooler can use an axe. He's one of the most delightfully goofy people I know, and also one of the most serious artists I know. Those things are connected, and I wanted to understand how.

This conversation covers enormous ground. It begins with a barn fire — a four-year-old in spaceship pajamas holding a glow stick, watching hundreds of feet of flame erase something he took for granted was permanent. From there we move through the man across the street who taught Adam to watch ants for hours, through years of caring for people with HIV and AIDS in early-2000s Portland, to a night on a mountain in Maine when a disco ball, a flashlight, and a smoke machine produced the photograph that made everything snap into focus.

We talk about the game of Go and why clinging to what mattered fifty moves ago will kill you. About riding a bicycle at twelve miles an hour as a way of not quite being anywhere. About the difference between making something for real and making it in Photoshop — and whether that difference matters. About the pocket watch his dying friend gave him with a note that said have a different relationship to time.

And we talk about boredom — specifically, what lives on the other side of it. The land within all of our minds that opens up when you sit with the discomfort long enough to push through.

Fair warning: the range of this conversation goes from Bluey to Walter Benjamin.

(cover photo: A Disco Ball on the Mountain, 2005, courtesy of the artist and CLAMP, New York)

Transcript

# The Principal Uncertainty — Episode Transcript
## Adam Ekberg: "On the Other Side of Boredom (or: A Particular Kind of Not Mattering That Matters)"

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**Adam Ekberg** (01:03)
I've been excited and not nervous, but it's like — you know, I go into these things usually with parameters. So it's kind of interesting. I'm curious as to where it goes. Kind of exciting. It's that feeling you get right before you do something. Speaking of parenting — Juniper has to hear this a lot from me when she's nervous about something. Like, that's a great feeling. The nervous feeling right before something happens, because that means you're really doing something.

**George Laufenberg** (01:29)
And we're off. Yeah, like that's it, man. That is — Adam, that is like the beating heart of the thing. Like that feeling, right? That way of knowing. I'm thinking of — did you guys watch Bluey when she was little?

**Adam Ekberg** (01:40)
A little bit.

**George Laufenberg** (01:44)
There was this great line where one of the dogs in kindergarten didn't have a tail. And Bingo was really concerned and she's like, "But how does she know when she's happy?" Like the body tells, right? The wagging tells her that she's happy. It was just typically sort of brilliant inversion of the usual hypercognitive way we think about this stuff, which is why I loved what you just said. It was exactly that question of listening to your body, being present to your experience of yourself as a primate. Like — wow, what's going on right now? How am I moving through the world?

**Adam Ekberg** (02:23)
Right. Well, and I mean — speaking as people that met as parents, I mean, there's no more vibrant way to see it than when it's being mediated through your child. Because, you know, at a certain point I haven't become desensitized to big feelings or nervousness. I'm certainly nervous before I do something. But to see it just take over her body, like it sort of overwhelms her — it's like talking someone back from the precipice of something just gigantic. But I can look at it and I can completely relate.

And I think that's a feeling — like if you don't have that feeling, what are you really doing? If you're not having that feeling, you're kind of dialing it in.

**George Laufenberg** (03:05)
Yeah, you're running out the clock.

I have a list of questions and all that sort of stuff, but it feels crazy not to start with our shared experience as parents. This is how we know each other, through this incredibly quirky, wonderful, imperfect, but from my perspective fundamentally great experience of forest school — in the part of New Jersey that no one knows exists.

**Adam Ekberg** (03:30)
Totally. Like ten miles from Pennsylvania. It's everything from double-wide trailers to McMansions. It's a real sort of hodgepodge-y place. And then you had to find a nature school where you had to sign a waiver that the kids could wield axes as preschoolers. It's not culturally normal here. There's been other places where if I found that school, I'd be like, well, this makes sense. And here it was like — wow, this is a real outlier. Or maybe I haven't gotten out enough in my over a decade of living in this area. But I found it a real kind of anomaly in that cultural space.

**George Laufenberg** (04:10)
Yeah, that's completely consistent with my experience of Hunterdon County and most of the Garden State. This was a definite outlier. And it's funny — that waiver was exactly the moment. I think about that as an artifact, right? I'm engaging with a piece of paper, and I was like, wait a minute. I knew this was going to be cool, but — sign off on risky play? It was the axe that I used to tell people about.

**Adam Ekberg** (04:30)
Do you remember — because Juniper still throws this around — the term "blood circle"? Like if you're doing something dangerous, he's like, you're in the blood circle. She's eleven and a half now. That was like six, seven years ago. But "blood circle" stuck with her. It's a commonly used term in the family.

**George Laufenberg** (04:45)
The blood circle! That's fantastic.

**Adam Ekberg** (04:59)
Yeah.

**George Laufenberg** (05:02)
You guys went from Painted Oak, the forest school, to the Friends School in Princeton, right? Is she still there? So what has that evolution been like? I want to invite a little reflection on your experience as a dad, as it has continued to evolve.

**Adam Ekberg** (05:15)
No, it's been amazing. It was interesting going to a Friends school, which is — I mean, it's very non-denominational. We're not Quakers, although I really align with that way of thinking, what little I know about it. But when it came time to look at schools — Painted Oak was amazing. If she could have gone to college through a nature school, I would have been like, you should do that. And so then it was like, what are our options in this area?

I'll keep this general, but my heart of hearts was very much like, public school. When we moved here, we moved here partly because we looked at the ratings for public schools — which are these very crude numeric ratings. A seven doesn't mean anything. The list of problems with that is long and systemic. But the school down the street from us is great. My experience when we went there, though — going in looking, I guess, the way I look — they looked at me like I was dangerous. I was treated very strange.

And one time I rode my bicycle by, and in this moment — it was like a movie — all the boys, and only the boys, on the playground broke away and formed a pack and started chasing me and yelling "hippie" at me. And I was like, wow. They're like eight or something. I was like, that's kind of an antiquated term. And I don't think I'm a hippie — I'm a dude on a bike going to the grocery store.

We were seeking out a space where Juniper could be herself. And as a father of a girl — it's amazing how fast the world comes at you. I've had people straight up, when she was an infant, essentially sexualize her, gender her. I know she has to live in this world, she has to address these things. But I also feel like we can wait a minute on coming full force.

**George Laufenberg** (07:13)
Yeah.

**Adam Ekberg** (07:41)
There was some normalizing of taunting me for — I don't know, something triggered something in those kids' brains. And I just thought, I don't want her to have to do this yet. Growing up in Massachusetts in the '80s and '90s, school was like the Wild West of bullying and hazing. I hope we've improved. But I try to ride a line between — I know I can't protect her from the world, but I'd like to give her a launching place where she's endowed with skills so she can put up with that bullshit.

I came with a critical nature of both public and private schools. I went to a public school through fourth grade. And to say it didn't serve me would be generous. By the end, there's a terrible teacher there. They determined I was ill-equipped to be in a regular classroom. I was put in what they called the resource room. And back then, even though you should have known — kids were going to come up with a word for what that room was called. This was not me — this was the culture of the place. It was called the "retard room." And I was in that room.

So I was yanked out of that and put in one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country. It happened to be in the town I'm from in Massachusetts. And all of a sudden now I'm in fifth grade, wearing a tie. School meetings where they say we're all future leaders of the world. And some of them probably were. It just wasn't me. And now I'm navigating that space. Neither of them had any sensitivity to the individual, to put it mildly. Both were a canned experience and both were pretty blind and dumb.

But when it came to this, I bristled at all things education. I was like, which flavor is this going to be? And we're really lucky that we found a place that's so amazing. No place is perfect, but it's an incredible school, an incredible community. The people that work there are just some of the best educators I've ever met. I couldn't say enough good things about it. So to satisfy someone with my overly active bullshit detector for education — that's high praise. High bar.

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**George Laufenberg** (10:19)
It's a high bar.

**Adam Ekberg** (10:23)
I had a friend who's since passed. I met him when I was an infant and he was probably forty-five years old. He was a neighbor across the street from me, a photographer and a naturalist. I pretty much spent all the time I could following him around.

He passed in 2018, which still — he was in his early eighties. It's brutal. It still hurts so bad. His name was Tony King, or B.A. King — a really well-known photographer and naturalist who made a lot of books, wrote a lot. He was just completely unusual in the place where I grew up.

I grew up in a town twenty-five miles west of Boston. When I was a kid, it still had one foot in agricultural, which seems sort of strange. There was a fair amount of farms. In this little plot of land, my parents rented — as the story goes, as I believe it — from a family that was incredibly affluent. They had hundreds of acres of land. My parents rented what was the farmhouse attached to this barn. The family invented denim, I think — they were uber-loaded. My parents eventually bought the house.

When I was four and a half years old, we had a serial arsonist going around my town, setting fire to all the barns. I bring this up because it precipitated my town — the town I grew up in — becoming completely subdivided. Early '80s. Something that was going to happen already. All the farmers were older, all the barns got burned to the ground by the serial arsonist, and then the whole thing just — boom — was McMansions, almost overnight. The character of the town changed wildly.

My friend Tony lived across the street. There was this night where — my parents knew it was coming. My mom's mom had passed away, so she had this cigar box of jewelry and photo albums in her bed. We were basically in a ready-to-leave situation because our house was so close to this barn, which was filled with hay. The way this guy did it, evidently, was he would sneak in, plant a candle in a hay bale — maybe with some accelerant — light it, and go out the window.

Sometime in the evening, I think my mom saw it, called the fire department and the police. By the time they came, the thing was already gone — filled with hay. My dad was in his pajamas out front with a garden hose, spraying down the facade of our house, trying to keep it from burning down. My mom rushed us out of the house.

And it's weird — as best I can tell, it's my earliest childhood memory. I come out of the house and I'm put in the hands of a stranger. I'm just being held there, watching the barn — flames hundreds of feet up in the air. People could see it ten miles away. And then someone gave me a glow stick.

I attribute so much to this. I was wearing my spaceship pajamas with footies on them. And I was holding this glow stick and just watching this barn completely — hundreds of feet of flames. And there was this — I've since thought about it a fair amount — this very quick introduction to your place in the universe, the universe being very big and yourself being very small, as you hold a small glow stick and look at the towering inferno of this thing that you took for granted as permanent.

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So yeah, we grew up there. And then this guy across the street, Tony King, was just a godsend. I was a weird kid. I liked talking to grownups, in many cases more than kids. I always had a couple of good friends, but I'd just hang out with him. I'd follow him around and we'd go into the woods. We wouldn't talk. We would just sit and watch ants for like an hour and a half. That's it.

All through high school, I'd come back and the first thing I'd do is drop by and find a time to meet up with him. We'd sit at a diner and we'd just sit there for twenty minutes and not even talk. And it was like tuning into a frequency. We'd just sit there, and then it would happen. He was the most giving, soft-spoken, generous person. He gave it all away.

When he knew he was going to die, he gave me his pocket watch with a note that just said, "Have a different relationship to time."

**George Laufenberg** (15:19)
That is beautiful.

**Adam Ekberg** (15:21)
And to the degree he had ever swore — he begrudgingly told me he was going to die. And he said, "I have lousy cancer."

So yeah, we lived there until I was five and then our house got sort of trashed — that fire is part of the reason. We moved to this place two miles away, but it was way more suburban. Far lamer. Because the first house was on hundreds of acres of farmland. I could just go off for the whole day as a little kid and be in these fields and forests. It was a playground. It was amazing. I was so spoiled.

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**George Laufenberg** (16:00)
I'm really struck by the way you framed sitting at a table at a diner with him — like tuning into a frequency. Finding the carrier wave.

**Adam Ekberg** (16:11)
Totally. We'd have maybe something to eat and a coffee and then four hours would go by. And he'd throw down a pretty significant tip — I mean, it was rent for the space and the time.

**George Laufenberg** (16:25)
You told that story as sort of formative in a number of ways. What does it look like for you — being present? This has been a feature of our entire friendship. I have appreciated and enjoyed and I think learned from some of the really soft and playful ways in which I experience you as being super present. That's one of the first things I noticed when we started connecting as buddies, a long time ago. I was in the throes of finishing PhD work, very much stuck in my head a lot of the time. And I just deeply appreciated that kind of texture and cadence of interaction. Maybe that's the echo I was hearing in the way you told that story.

**Adam Ekberg** (17:46)
When making art, I found myself with a couple of experiences I think relate very specifically to this barn fire — holding this glow stick, being held by a stranger, watching this barn fill the night sky. Which I should say, at the time I was four and a half, so I had very limited idea of consequences. Like, we might not have a home to live in. Someone could be hurt or killed. I was just like — this is kind of fabulous. This is visually striking. The world is not what I thought it was. The world is very different tonight.

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So years later, I moved back to Maine and into this carriage house in the West End of Portland. I was doing anything to get a job to pay rent and bills, thinking about going back to school for art. For a while I was driving an ice cream truck. I had no real intentions — if there was an application to be filled out, I was filling it out.

I ended up working in my neighborhood, walking distance from my house, at a six-bed facility for people with HIV and AIDS. I did that job for three years, but if you do that job as a certified registered medical aide — which is, I say this with the most respect, the lowest rung of healthcare — your superpower with a twenty-four-hour class is you can pass medication. That was really what I was there to do.

We were sitting on top of everyone's HIV meds, which were a little different in the early 2000s. It wasn't the initial cocktail, but it's not like today where it's very much managed. Taking care of six people's HIV meds — when it came time to do that every two hours, you got all the paperwork, and it was laser focus. Very serious. And you're also cooking and cleaning for the residents.

Even though you're professional, you became fond of people there. You develop a deep affection — you can't help it. And some of those people lived and some of them didn't. I was with some of those people at the end of their life. I sat with some when they passed, or found someone right after they had. It ingrained, especially from one nurse, this idea that death is sort of a process. You don't just die. There's a transition.

I remember finding this one person — I just thought, I need to stay calm. He was DNR. I knew he was not going to live. But I sat and talked to him. And you quickly realize — you have this twenty-four-hour class, most of what you're doing is making sandwiches and passing meds, but every now and then you're doing something like this. You are completely ill-equipped, but you're the only person there. So you will be doing the best job you can.

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While I was doing that, I gutted the first floor of our carriage house and turned it into an art gallery. All my friends were in school at a program for documentary studies in Maine. A lot of them were doing radio. Actually, for the longest time on the internet, the only things about me were two things: I'd written a jazz review that was terrible, and the guy's letter to the editor about what an idiot I was. And then I was on Weekend All Things Considered for three minutes in 2004 — a story about me playing bocce ball through the winters in Maine on a day where my whole house had frozen and I had nowhere to live anymore.

I was hanging out with people at the school for documentary studies, hanging out with a bunch of artists at this gallery I'd started, thinking about school. And while I was doing that, someone did a documentary project on one of our residents. And this is where — there's a lot of different ways to look at photography — but I hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it.

It depicted this person who I actually had a pretty complicated relationship with. There was a resident that really hated me, for no reason I could understand. Something about me reminded her of something, or just triggered her. When people are at that stage of life, there's so much on the surface. She really fucking hated me.

I did so many things with this person. I remember driving all night — I took her to a place where she got a wig because she'd lost her hair to cancer. Driving down this land bridge, this crazy night where she and I and someone from a volunteer organization were dancing while she tried on wigs. I had these amazing memories with this person, but at the same time, especially towards the end, she would really, really hate me.

And these photographic depictions of her were just — they looked like cliché pictures representing people with HIV and AIDS in what I thought was a fairly reductive way. Whether that's me or objectively true, I don't know. But I really fucking hated them.

---

Then I went to grad school. I moved to Chicago. A year later, I made this photograph — and it's where two things come into focus. The first story about the barn fire and the second about the hospice work.

**George Laufenberg** (23:35)
Is this the disco ball?

**Adam Ekberg** (23:38)
Yeah. So — for listeners who haven't seen it —

**George Laufenberg** (23:42)
Can you describe what we're looking at?

**Adam Ekberg** (23:46)
In the end, what it is: it's a picture of a disco ball on top of a mountain of dust, being hit by a flashlight that makes two million candles of luminosity that I got at Home Depot. And there's a car battery that goes to a power inverter that goes to a smoke machine, to make particulates so that the shafts of light coming off the ball aren't just light — they're present and kind of embodied.

In order to do it — almost every night for a month, I went up a mountain or I went someplace. It was often just one little mountain in Maine I've been going up since I was ten, with a buddy, two beers in our back pockets, just trying to make this thing happen. You have a fifteen-minute window at dusk — either it's too light or it's too dark. Then you have to deal with shifting winds, all the situational things to make the pragmatic event happen.

In the end, it's a photograph made with a large format camera. A big, high-fidelity image of a disco ball radiating light on top of a mountain at dusk.

I looked at that picture — I'd gone out with kind of no intentionality — and quickly, to me, it was as close as I'd felt to the experience of being with someone at the end. Very different — almost a counterpoint to those pictures, those depictions of people I felt were rather cliché. And immediately I was like — wow. And I'm sort of the arsonist. I'm going someplace, staging this fantastical thing. I've since made photographs that actually involve fire or aerosol containers, so the comparisons become even closer. But I'm going there, doing something for my own purposes, with completely different ends. When I use fire, I bring a fire extinguisher and a shovel. I never want to cause an issue.

But it was both — the experience of holding the glow stick and seeing the fire, and the experience of someone at the end of their life, and the failure of photography to encapsulate that for me. And then I was in my studio in Chicago looking at this photograph and it was like — it all snapped together. Which are experiences you need a little life behind you to have.

And going out with no intention was the best part. If I had gone out and tried to make a picture that was like, "I had a problematic relationship with the representation of death and dying and I'm going to go make a counterpoint" — that'd be a piece of shit. That'd be terrible. I didn't even think about it. I hadn't thought about that in months. But when I saw that photograph, I was like — holy shit, this is totally that.

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**George Laufenberg** (26:44)
So there's some intention, right? There are pieces in play. What does that look like for you?

**Adam Ekberg** (26:51)
I always go out without intention.

I hit the ground running in Chicago for grad school. I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, I've got two years, this is costing money — I was not someone who was expecting to do this. I found the best school I could go to that I could afford. I was not going to miss a second. So I was just doing shit in my apartment. That was the best gift — urgency, fear, fuck it, let's go.

At a time when Photoshop ruled — a lot of people came in with more background than me, making very finished Photoshop stuff. Which is great. I just can't do that with Photoshop. So maybe I can try and make something happen in the world. Which was the best gift ever — to not be endowed with those tools. I did go out without intention. But then what I found was quickly informing what was kind of latent inside me. Things I'd been ruminating on. Because when I saw it, I was like — there you are. I've been waiting for you. It was a keystone image to a lot of other stuff.

I remember — we went to church until I was about five. I hated church a lot. Probably the only thing about church that I loved is randomly one day, someone busted out a Super 8 projector and we watched that French film — *The Red Balloon*. Have you seen that?

**George Laufenberg** (28:40)
Yeah, sure.

**Adam Ekberg** (28:46)
And I was just like — holy fuck. This sort of anthropomorphized balloon — how many balloons are there in the world? I identified so much with this balloon. I remember watching that thing on the old Super 8 projector, on a card table in church. I was like, this is fucking amazing.

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**George Laufenberg** (29:10)
Is there an analog in your process to the twenty minutes of silence at the table when you're tuning into the carrier wave?

**Adam Ekberg** (29:16)
There might be an analog in the intent. A lot of the photographs I make these days are with my spouse. I'm so grateful — she helps me, and my daughter, because they're the team I have right here. And the rest of the team is good friends. That's the production team.

The making of them is usually a bit of a shit show. Many of them go on for years. There are things I've been trying to make for years. Things I've been working on for decades that haven't happened yet.

It's a shit show. But the end result is things that are captured at a zenith — temporal, but trapped forever. And I think in that moment is the feeling you're describing of tuning in. To be around things that are captured as still, relatively permanent moments — things that are temporal as permanent moments — that's the juiciest for me.

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**George Laufenberg** (30:30)
Adam, you have always struck me as — and I wouldn't have thought to put it exactly this way, except probably for you bringing in that church anecdote — a man of profound faith. I mean that in a very specific sense. Somebody said to me a very long time ago, when I was banging my head against a rigid notion of faith: what if faith weren't about belief without proof, but rather trust without reservation?

That's the sense in which you've struck me as a man of profound faith — both in people and in your own process, something that unfolds over decades, with that degree of trust. I think of it in the most nuts-and-bolts sense, too, in some of the stories you've told me about harrowing solitary adventures and misadventures on a bike. The silly version is driving past a school and having a pack of feral eight-year-olds — future ICE agents of America — chasing you. But I'm also thinking of the less silly stories — Florida, being harassed on a bike. Scary situations.

And now you're talking about decades-long timescales for work. I certainly didn't have a sense of that before.

**Adam Ekberg** (32:23)
I made one in the pandemic that I actually finished in the pandemic. So it was just Kate, my spouse, and Juniper, for pragmatic reasons — you couldn't really see anyone else.

It's a photograph I shot in five different states. Maine, everywhere in New England, Michigan, Indiana. It's a five-gallon bucket — a five-gallon bucket my father gave me. It's actually in a lot of my photographs. It's so weird.

It seems very pragmatic. I've used it as a fulcrum to make a catapult image — launching a lawn chair on the plains of the Midwest. It's got a one-by-six on that same bucket. I had a show at the George Eastman Museum, and my buddy Dave, who's been an assistant for a lot of these photographs, and Kate were joking about who had been in more of them or had a bigger role in the process. Dave was like, "The five-gallon bucket is actually in more than both of us."

So: it's a five-gallon bucket. And then there's a bicycle wheel — just the rim — planted in the ground. It's wrapped in a piece of hemp rope that's been dipped in white gas and lit on fire. So it's a burning ring. And then I watched a YouTube video by some eleven-year-old kid who'd modified a shaving cream container so he could shoot further for shaving cream wars with his friends. So I modified the nozzle. I had to keep the shaving cream warm, pressed against my body. I did shaving cream tests with many different kinds of shaving cream.

You light the ring first, then run over. It's pitched upward, balancing on a Bic lighter. So the trajectory of the valve is slightly upward. I took a piece of packing tape and taped a die — a dice — so it depresses the button, and it shoots a perfect arc of shaving cream through the burning bicycle wheel.

Because my process has no digital manipulation — the camera is just a witness — if there's any mistake, there's no clone-stamping things out. If it misses, it just doesn't work. It has to pass effortlessly, first time, right through that ring, eight and a half feet away. I tape it down and run out of frame. Juniper was seven, and she's on the camera. I yell — and she trips the shutter.

But it took two and a half years to do it.

What you have at the end is very different from the experience, which is chaos. If I did my job right, it looks like it was always just there. Elegant and calm. Temporal but permanent — a permanent representation of this preposterous, fleeting thing.

---

**George Laufenberg** (35:28)
Does "collaborative" feel too strong for the support you've gotten?

**Adam Ekberg** (35:32)
I don't care about agency or authorship a whole lot. The ideas are mine — I come up with them. I usually come in with a how-we-can-get-it-done plan. But if anyone has a good idea, I'm all ears. The execution is very collaborative.

**George Laufenberg** (35:53)
I was thinking about that in productive tension with solitude. That word comes to mind a lot when I think of you. There's a feel to a lot of the images I've seen of yours that evokes solitude. And just knowing you as a mammal for a long time — you have gone to significant lengths to honor what seems like a profound commitment to it.

I remember when I met Kate and Juniper — we came down to Ocean City, and you were on a cross-country bike trip, actually squatting in our house in Montana at the time.

**Adam Ekberg** (36:36)
I was riding my bike across the country and literally squatting in your house. I don't know if I'm supposed to reveal that, but yes. That's exactly where I was.

**George Laufenberg** (36:50)
Kate mentioned something about your commitment to these bikepacking trips. As someone who had a hard time taking any kind of time away from my kids because of my own guilt — Kate mentioned something about an agreement you guys had made, that you were preserving this time on a regular basis. And there was just nothing but respect.

**Adam Ekberg** (37:53)
There are so many things I want to say at the same time here.

To speak to art and solitude — most of my favorite conversations are with people you wouldn't expect. I remember being in grad school at a show in Chicago, and my friend's dad — who I think would very much not identify as an art guy, more of a hunter from Pennsylvania — was looking at my photographs for a long time. He came up to me and said: "I can tell from your photographs you like to be in the middle of nowhere. I too like to be in the middle of nowhere."

And I was like — I've totally got you, yes. We went on to talk about his love of being out there in solitude. And I was like, yeah, this is just an artifice. The experience of being out there is what I'm all about.

And the thing with Kate — that is true. There was this sort of joking when we talked about having kids. There was a list of things that came to mind immediately. Until a certain point in my life, I'd never put myself into a situation I couldn't get out of. Having kids is maybe the one you really can't get out of.

And there were the more normie child experiences — water parks. I had a list: I can't do fucking water parks. But the second Juniper turned three, I took her with a friend in a trailer, and I pulled her — she pedaled a little — from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC. She'd just turned three. We camped the whole way. At the end she looked like she'd come up out of a mine. Covered in dirt. I had a picture of her wearing a pot on her head.

It's not that I won't do things. There's a family of things under the heading of expectations that I had a hard time with.

When we had the conversation about biking, it was along those lines. I knew I needed to do things like that to preserve myself. Not to do them would have been, cosmetically, maybe to be a better parent — but I certainly wouldn't have been. Far more volatile, probably.

**George Laufenberg** (40:24)
And I think that connects to what I was saying about you as a person of faith or trust — trusting that you know what you need to be a better parent. That's a place I've struggled tremendously. It would have been much better for me to take care of myself in a certain way, but I was too concerned with what people would think, so I did X instead of Y, and my kids paid the price. I could think of fifteen times that happened. So when I talk about that kind of trust, it's with great respect.

**Adam Ekberg** (41:02)
That's a high compliment. I'm only so comfortable — it's all such a work in progress. To say I have anything figured out would be to sit here and lie to you. And I kind of like it that way. I like amateurism. I've traded away a lot of certainty, I think.

The certainty that life has provided me the chance to pass by is not something I would trade for whatever this is.

**George Laufenberg** (41:43)
Unpack that.

**Adam Ekberg** (41:45)
It's probably less profound than — maybe I should stop there because it probably sounds better than it is. But to the degree I can say — I'm sort of scrapping. I'm still reaching. I'm an artist, I'm a sometimes-professor, but I'm not a tenured professor. I had an option to be a tenured professor and it just wasn't working.

It would have made a lot of sense to ride that out and try to get something else. It would have been an easier place to operate from. But life isn't that long. I just turned fifty. I'm not that old. I've lost friends — young and old. And when you can look ahead and see something and you don't fully like it, I would opt for having no fucking clue what I'm doing. Even if that means losing things like insurance, or rent becomes harder. There's a cost-benefit that at a certain point becomes almost existential to wellness.

I've been in situations where something would make a lot of logical sense and it just doesn't fit. When I lived in Florida and taught for a while — I loved it, I miss my colleagues and the school tremendously. One of the things that separated me, I think, from other people is really singular and pragmatic: I ride my bike to work. That's something I've always done. If I'm within fifteen miles of a thing, I'll try to do it on a bicycle.

And something really interesting happened — kind of an accidental sociological experiment. This was a while ago, maybe things have changed. Tampa has the second-highest bicycle fatalities in the country, next to Orlando, I believe. I didn't know that when I got there. I went to a local bike store and got a fluorescent vest — they were selling them for your safety.

About a month later, the governor mandated that if you were panhandling — because there's no pedestrian culture in Tampa — you had to wear that fluorescent vest. And because we live in a fucked-up world where homeless people are undervalued and seen as disposable, I had inadvertently marked myself as homeless while commuting.

I won't go down a litany of stories, but I had two and a half handguns pointed at my face. I was called terrible terms. Things thrown at me. At year three of enduring the grossest words imaginable, and literal I'm-going-to-fucking-shoot-you handgun situations — I was like, how much is this really worth it?

I could have stopped riding my bike. That was the sensible option. I just didn't want to.

That can be looked at as very foolish, selfish, indulgent, privileged. And I'll take all of those — that's all true. But I just didn't want to be driving my car back and forth because I was afraid.

---

**George Laufenberg** (45:49)
I keep thinking back to where this conversation started — parenting your kid through the embodied experience of nervousness. That feeling you have when you're awake and paying attention. Were you cultivating vulnerability in that?

**Adam Ekberg** (46:21)
It's interesting. I rode my bike my whole life. Then I had this terrible accident where I knocked my three front teeth out in Portland, Maine, in 1999. No insurance. So I had to grunt my way through many years of my mid-to-late twenties with no teeth.

Which is character building. It made dating hilarious, made trying to get a job rather funny. I had this plastic thing called a flipper — supposed to be in your mouth for six months. Mine was nicotine-stained, one side broken off, it kind of flopped. I lost it sometimes. It was uncomfortable.

When I got to Chicago, it just made sense to ride again. I lived on a train line — school and work were a straight shot. But as soon as I had to pick up film from a lab or do a third thing, half my day was transfers. I was like — I could ride my bike. So I started riding, and everything I'd missed after that seven-year absence came rushing back.

I joked for a while in my early forties that everything I wanted to do well at twelve, I was figuring out at forty. When I was twelve, if you could have told me that I could ride my bike with a friend, leave the city of Chicago, go up into Wisconsin, camp, and bike back — I would have been the happiest kid ever. And then I started to achieve that.

The bike — especially when you're in a place you don't love, like my time in Florida — when you're on a bike, you're not really there. When you're walking, you're there. When you're driving, you're there. But when you're biking, you're fluid and floating. You're not part of the system. You're not limited by speed or laws. At twelve and a half miles an hour, you just float by. If someone has an argument on the street — you drift past. You're in a sort of space unto yourself.

I'd look out my window at a job I didn't really like, and I'd specifically park my bicycle right there. We started calling them escape pods. I'd see my bike and look at my watch — an hour and twenty-three minutes and it's right there. There's no waiting for the bus, no train. A straight line. Inevitably I'd meet up with a friend and we'd go get into something silly.

---

**George Laufenberg** (49:30)
That is such a specific cadence of movement through the world. Can you connect the dots between that cadence and what you've come to understand about the rhythm of your work?

**Adam Ekberg** (49:42)
I'd say I've spent a lot of my life trying to get away from things. And I mean that maybe more positively than it sounds.

There's a picture of me and my best friend when we're nineteen. I took a semester off from school, he'd dropped out of college. We saved up our money and bought a 1977 Toyota Chinook — this wonky, underpowered Toyota truck with a modified Winnebago camper in the back. I put a darkroom in it and we went cross-country and everything went sideways. I ended up living with people I'd never known before in Houston. It was just bizarro.

I lived in a van for a while right out of college. The world was just — I have to get a job, I don't want to. How can I not do this? I couldn't hold it off forever, but I did a lot of working when I could — cleaning houses, landscaping, taking care of llamas for a while in Oregon. Just making enough and then having time.

I hear people who are retired say, "I don't know what to do with my time." I'm like — give it to me. I'll take every fucking second of it. I'll take it over money. It's all we have. It's so precious. And I wasted time — and I think wasting time is also maybe a good use of time. But having it is the best.

**George Laufenberg** (54:00)
I was just this morning with my younger daughter watching a video of her at age two, dropping rocks into the river here in town. Hours a day.

**Adam Ekberg** (54:07)
That's my friend Tony. He was the example of still doing that into his eighties. That was what he gave me. He was deadly serious, a very hard worker, a lot of things that are societally valued. He would also go sit on the ground in a really nice pair of pants — he was a well-dressed dude — and just watch ants.

And then the idea that you go out with these intentions and maybe your intentions lead you through this series of things — from this barn fire to working with people with AIDS — and then you find this little rupture in the universe. This little space that you're particularly sensitive to, around objects being anthropomorphized. And it comes really specifically back to Tony. He gave me all this stuff. Just gave it away.

And then you end up in academia and you're like — shit, I've got to get tenure. I've got to get in a journal. This show matters, that show doesn't matter. And all this stuff that was so meaningful has been sort of institutionally taken. Because you need to pay rent, you need to make a living. The world doesn't care about balloons and little things that are delicate and fleeting and fabulous. The world cares about things it can quantify. And I think that's a really important thing to be aware of when you're making decisions.

---

I heard about a researcher who studies athletes — but they realized they couldn't study athletes in the moment, so they started using people playing games, because they exhibit a lot of the same physiological traits. A chess player at peak performance — Magnus Carlsen — the body is doing things like you're a linebacker in football. Heart rate up, blood pressure up. All that, in a chair.

One of the things this person claimed is that when you're on tilt, you often take your tongue and put it on the roof of your mouth. I've said this more than once — it sounds like a throwaway, but it's important. When I'm with students and things get heated, I'll ask: "Where's your tongue right now?" And they'll be like — and it sounds silly. But when you're playing a game and your tongue's on the roof of your mouth, you know you're not all there. You're super on tilt. Being aware of your body in even that way — I don't know. It matters.

**George Laufenberg** (57:14)
I'm rethinking a lot of the moments where you were teaching me how to play go.

**Adam Ekberg** (57:19)
My computer is resting on my fly-fishing stuff, my fly-tying setup, and my go board. That's my setup here. The things I love very much.

I love go so much. I've been playing a lot with the Princeton Go Club. I have a teacher. I should make it very clear — I'm not even close to good at go. But there's so much that can be extrapolated from that game.

One of the things you learn really early in go — you don't have to be very good to know this — there's something happening when you're putting down stones on a board and you can see something. It's concrete, which makes it amazing to then see it's true in other parts of life. A stone matters, or a group of stones matters. And then twenty-five moves later, they don't matter at all. Something has happened and they were small. You can even sacrifice them. You might want your opponent to take them.

There's a constant reassessment. What mattered at one moment does not the next. Value is only in relation to that moment and that board position. If you cling to the idea that that group of stones matters — you're dead. You might even save that group of stones, and great, have them. But it's not going to matter. Something else is bigger. You weren't awake to see it.

---

**George Laufenberg** (59:19)
Make explicit for me the connection between that mattering and the way it so clearly matters to you in your work that things actually happen. I'm thinking about your commitment to film rather than digital. The event-ness. Whether it's the disco ball across thirty trips, or your kid tripping the shutter as the shaving cream goes through the ring. Do you know when it's done? Is there a moment where you're like — that was it, moving on?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:00:07)
There are several things I want to say at the same time. I don't totally care about film, but I do care. I don't think the art is the photograph. The art is: I make the drawing and I make the thing happen and I'm there to witness the thing. The photograph is just an artifice — the way a CD of your favorite album is not the album. The CD is just the delivery system. That's how I see the photograph. But it needs to be perfect — a window into that thing.

Film only matters to me in terms of its fidelity. What does matter is this: if I had a camera that makes a burst — a series of images in rapid fire — that'd be a totally different thing than me feeling it at the zenith.

My friend Dave and I drove from New York City to Northeastern Indiana — my spouse's family's farm, this giant sprawling place. We stayed for a few days and I tried to make all this shit happen. One of them was the catapult. A five-gallon bucket, a one-by-six board, this really poppy red woven old-school lawn chair. We'd take turns — one person operating the camera, the other taking a cinder block, throwing it up so it lands on the other side of that fulcrum and shoots the chair into the air, then running out of frame.

I shot that thing twenty-five times — not an inconsequential expenditure on film and processing. And I had to ask myself: am I doing this because I want to make sure I get it — which was absolutely true — or is it just the funniest fucking thing to do? Because every time, something would go sideways, and we'd just be belly-laughing. Uncle Ken had given us his old Silverado. We're out in this pickup truck in the middle of nowhere, just launching this chair all day and laughing.

As an image — if I'd had a camera that shot a burst, a frame every sixteenth of a second for two seconds, it's a different thing than me feeling that lawn chair at its zenith. The shutter is only a five-hundredth of a second long. I have to get that chair when it's neither going up nor going down — because it'll be blurry. That moment where it kind of stops but feels like it's continuing to go.

And this is a throwaway thing, something I say in Photo One classes: I'll show a little bit of my work, and inevitably someone says, "You could just do that in Photoshop in five seconds." I'm like — yeah, totally. You can totally do this in Photoshop in five seconds. Is it different? I don't have an answer. If you had the exact same visual result and made it in a digital lab — does that matter more than me and my friend driving to Northeastern Indiana? We stopped along the way and almost ordered all-you-can-eat raw mussels. We slept on couches, played a lot of blitz chess at night, drank too much in Uncle Ken's extra bedroom. We went to a pancake breakfast.

That doesn't matter. Or does it? I went to that field, I made that photograph, I didn't augment it. Does it matter? And I don't know.

But I sometimes wonder — what does it mean to spend your life making a bunch of photographs of silly shit that doesn't matter? These little temporal things that could have been made in Photoshop. Does it matter?

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:05:16)
It sounds like you're describing a completely inverse relationship to time. The photographs — the weight of it is everything that led to that moment.

**Adam Ekberg** (1:05:37)
It's being there for that moment. Being there.

I was a somewhat athletic person. There's a lot of things I can't do — throw a football, ice skate to save my life. But I was always good at throwing something and hitting something else. I take deep primal satisfaction in that.

I made a drawing of this catapult. And there's something about going through the steps backwards — where is that location? Who do I need with me? Can I make this happen just long enough to exist for a photograph? Not a burst — not rapid fire and somewhere in there it happens. But with a large format film camera, it's like a muzzle loader. You load the thing in the barrel, do all the steps, and then you get one shot. You have that one moment — and then you got it or you didn't.

**George Laufenberg** (1:07:04)
Talk about the drawing. What's the sketching like?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:07:07)
It's so pragmatic. I had a show recently and the curator — I have a bunch of friends that are painters, and they're always like, "Your drawings are great." I'm like, you guys just like me too much. They're not great. They're very pragmatic. Sometimes I'll have notes on them if it's really complicated.

I made one in a house I was renting in Tampa. In the image, there's a table and a glass of milk with this huge splash coming out of it. In order to do that, I needed strobe flash and had all these notes. I taped a bunch of drinking straws across the ceiling. I made a little pin — a piece of monofilament went through the straws. There was a glass ball. I'd pull the line, the ball would fall in an exact spot. I made a little mark with a pencil, put a glass of milk there, set everything up. So some drawings have the notes of the engineering — "tape drinking straws, make this mechanism" — but mostly they're just very specific drawings of the thing I want to see.

Ultimately the game is: try to generate that moment, to exist long enough to photograph it, so it exists as a permanent representation of a fleeting thing.

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:08:51)
I'm thinking about what you said about the ephemerality of significance in go — move fifty matters and then it doesn't. How does that connect to the artifact quality of the sketches, the process? Is there a different kind of frozen moment in those?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:09:24)
I've always been — and this gets into art strategy, which I don't really care about — but when I have a show, I'm afraid of giving too much away. I feel like I've given up everything. My whole process has become pretty transparent.

I wouldn't want the drawing and the photograph held side by side. I think they'd reduce both. But the photograph should feel like conjuring.

Almost all the ideas come from either sitting in this little room getting bored, or honestly, from bike trips. I joke with Kate that this is how I justify my really long yearly bike trip. I just rode around Gaspé Bay — started in Northern Vermont, went to Montreal, Quebec City, hugged the coast around Gaspé, down to central Maine.

I make so many drawings on those trips because all you do all day is ride. I'm not a good meditator. But if I can give my body something to do — the act of riding a bicycle is kind of stupid. Once you know how, you pedal, you balance. Your mind has to operate enough to not get hit by a car, not crash into a tree. And then your unconsciousness is totally free. The little voice in your head is preoccupied with navigating, and then the other part of your mind is just a playground — drifting around. I come back with tons of ideas for drawings, for photographs. Good and bad.

On this topic: when I tell my students, if they have an idea, no matter how shitty — actually, the shittier your idea, the more you should see it all the way through. They'll be like, "This is a black-and-white photography class, this film costs money, I've got to process it, go to the darkroom, make contact sheets and prints." And I'll be like — yeah, you just do it.

The ideas that are sort of dumb are the best ideas. There's a specific kind of dumb idea — I call it the "good bad idea." That's the most important kind.

If you want to make a good photograph — HDR, something popular, someone hot and dancing — that thing's going to go bananas. People will love it. Or you could make something that sells something, inspires someone. I don't know. But when you're going out to do something that's by definition small and unassuming — it's hard to justify. A lot of the best ideas go unrealized because a lot of the best art doesn't serve a purpose other than to be there.

It's easy to look at one of those ideas and say, "This is sort of stupid, and why would I do that?" And it's still true — it's still really silly and doesn't matter. But what does it mean to make a lot of stuff that doesn't matter? What does it mean to dwell in a space of little things that don't matter? Little things that are hints of someone being there that's not there?

I think my response to *The Red Balloon* — watching that when I was four and a half — that's maybe an argument for the significance of these things. That movie, that Super 8 film at church, bowled me over.

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:14:12)
The significance is entirely relational, right? Inextricable from the moment and the interconnections between the moving parts, the people, the feelings. The word "matter" has come up an awful lot. Is the problem the imperative to have some abstract answer to whether something matters or not?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:14:50)
There's a particular kind of not-mattering that matters to me. And the things that matter don't matter.

I wish I was doing so much more. I think of the world we live in — I don't even know where to begin on how not-enough I feel I'm doing. I don't always know that art's the answer. I admire people that make that art, and I'm all for it. If I could do anything to make the world better with art, I would. I just don't know if I can. And I certainly don't think what I do makes the world better.

I think for a few people — a few people that see a show I have, when they're in a room full of those photographs and of a certain mind — it's a bridge of sorts between like-minded people. Someone that's like, "I totally get it." This room of little fleeting things stuck in a permanent state.

I'll trail off there because there's a part of it that could sound nihilistic. And that's not where I'm at. There's so much that matters. Nothing matters more right now than — thinking of politics, protests, all of that.

I guess what I'm hoping, if I'm doing anything at all, is just a nod to consciousness. The lightest of touch, in the silliest of ways, and hopefully the most self-aware ways — a very accessible, very absurdist sort of reference to consciousness.

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:16:59)
There are nine things I want to say in response to that. I keep thinking about time. When you were talking about music — there's a line, I think it's Hermann Hesse, that music is time made aesthetically perceptible. And I'm thinking about Walter Benjamin — on the task of the translator. How the work of translation is not at all about content but about form. That it touches the original the way a tangent touches a circle — at a point. There's something about the kind of mattering you're talking about, defining your position in contradistinction to abstract time. Is it about urgency?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:18:21)
To a certain degree, yes. Urgency is a word I've often — when I see art I really love, I think one of its qualities is that someone's doing something with very little. And I feel like they had to get this down. I feel it as a palpable quality in music, in art. They needed this.

A lot of the art I love is about making materials sing — taking very, very little and making something amazing. David Hammons. James Turrell. Roman Signer. Poets of light, or poets of detritus, of castaway objects. To do so much with so little — I almost don't know if there's a higher calling within visual art, for me.

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:19:53)
You've pointed out a couple of times that you're fifty. The Eastman Museum show was about eighteen months ago. How do you see that in relation to the arc of your public-facing work? I keep thinking about the lawn chair — the top of the ballistic arc.

**Adam Ekberg** (1:20:07)
The answer is it falls on the ground and ends. I still have that lawn chair. To sit on it, you have to be careful — it's got a lean.

**George Laufenberg** (1:20:46)
The afterlife of a lawn chair. I love it.

**Adam Ekberg** (1:20:50)
The disco ball from that photograph — from literally twenty years ago — is right there. I have a light. We have dance parties out here. It fell into a pond at one point. I glued pieces back on. But yeah.

**George Laufenberg** (1:21:04)
How do you experience that moment — the Eastman show — in relation to the public quality of your work? What, if anything, is different in your relationship to your own work after that?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:21:42)
I think I'm not unique. There's always a fear of — what next? What now? It was a very light sampling of like twelve years. Which looks pretty good. I have a lot to sample from. It was two very large rooms. For an artist like me, that was a very big deal. For another artist, it might be small potatoes.

To see twelve-plus years of work there — it's hard not to find that intimidating. When you have your first idea after that, you're like, this kind of sucks. Because you've been basking in a distillation of the best of what you've done for over a decade. You got to walk around in a space like your own brain — the greatest hits.

To pivot out of that into what's next is always hard. Some artists extend out infinite tendrils and go all over the place. I'm the guy that's sharpening my spear. Just whittling, whittling down. So what I have after that isn't wildly different, but hopefully it's purer. More congruent with intention. Exactly what I want to see in that moment.

The guiding principle throughout this — I've never really thought about how something's going to land. I've never done something for an audience. The guiding principle has been: will that be kind of fucking funny? There's an aspect of my process that's finding a good friend, stuffing a couple of beers in our back pockets, and going out to the woods. Even if shit goes sideways, that's still a pretty good day.

---

I remember early on — I was too green to know better — I was in a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the curator was making videos of artists at work. He said, could I come by when you're doing something? I said sure.

I was in the process of trying to fill my entire one-bedroom apartment with Bic lighters wedged open with cocktail umbrellas. I started with twenty, ended up with fifteen. I was on my knees trying to light them all while they're going out and then get to the camera.

He came in with a one-hour VHS tape. And I remember struggling — he was a lovely guy, I felt comfortable, but not like my best friend. And I heard that tape come out and the next one go in. And then the next one. Three one-hour tapes. Just me on the floor. Fuck.

I don't want people to know how hard they are. I don't want people to see that. That's not the piece. William Pope.L is one of the greatest artists that ever lived. I'm not William Pope.L. He may be best known for *The Great White Way*, where he's dressed in a Superman suit, crawling around New York City. A performance piece. A sweat-equity piece — the labor is the work.

In my case, I don't want people to see the labor. That's mine. That's on my side. What I want people to see is the amazing moment — this thing just willed into existence by faeries that happened to live in my apartment, that just crawled out of the broken plaster.

**George Laufenberg** (1:26:30)
The image of the VHS tapes as a kind of metronome.

**Adam Ekberg** (1:26:42)
I felt each one of them like a bullet. Poor guy having to watch this for another hour. It's like the slide carousel tray, right? You hear it right away. I think of pieces like Nan Goldin's *The Ballad of Sexual Dependency*, which is a slide carousel tray and a lot of Velvet Underground. You can't have that piece without the carousel. I don't care if you record it and play it with a digital representation. It's got to be a slide carousel to go *chunk-chunk*.

---

**George Laufenberg** (1:27:35)
Adam, I could go on talking to you for a very long time. In a perfect world, we have. I hope we will again. I so appreciate you — your time, your heart, your presence.

**Adam Ekberg** (1:27:50)
I appreciate you so much. New Jersey misses you.

**George Laufenberg** (1:27:56)
Can I ask you one last question, on the way out the door? What are you loyal to that you didn't choose?

**Adam Ekberg** (1:28:09)
Hmm.

I mean, I don't know about the "didn't choose" part, but —

I think in the end, art practice, whatever — it really is just something that enables having a series of experiences. And the people are paramount.

Not to answer the question, because it was intended as a question that has no answer — but the photograph I made when I drove from New York City with one of my best friends to Northeastern Indiana and spent an entire day trying to launch a lawn chair with a makeshift catapult that had a one-by-six board and a five-gallon plastic pail? Yeah, I could have made that thing in five minutes on fucking Photoshop. But the experience of being there, and the experience of being with that friend — that was all the stuff.

---

*Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. The conversation has been preserved as faithfully as possible to the original audio.*