There is a part of my life that I have never really explained to either of you. I think it’s time I tried.

When ArtNetWeb ended and I left New York, something happened that I didn’t fully understand at the time. During those years I had stopped being, first and foremost, a sculptor. ArtNetWeb had become my artwork. Instead of making installations, I was building communities, organizing artists, publishing ideas, and trying to imagine what art could become on a network that hardly anyone yet understood.

When that chapter closed, I wanted to become an artist again.

I did make work I remain proud of. Rupture in Cyberspace explored the strange territory between physical and virtual space. Working with Jonathan Schull and Guy Marsden, we built the 8-bit Ant Farm, returning to the collaboration with living systems that had always fascinated me. Then came Under the Volcano. Looking back, I can see those pieces were not isolated projects. This was a productive period — the proof that the artist in me was still alive, waiting for permission to come back to the surface.

Then life intervened.

Sharon and I divorced and I bought our house during the height of the housing bubble. It was a terrible financial decision. I paid too much, convinced myself I could make it work, and threw myself into building a business.

Inside, something was quietly disappearing.

Every hour I spent building software for clients was an hour I wasn’t making art. Every success as a businessman carried me a little farther from the person I had spent my life becoming. I kept telling myself that once the business was stable, I would return to my artwork.

That day never came.

Eventually the business collapsed. I couldn’t keep up with the mortgage, and the bank took the house. For years I saw losing the house as my greatest failure.

Now I see it differently.

The mistake wasn’t the loss itself, but the belief that I could build a meaningful life by becoming someone other than an artist.

After the divorce I entered Second Life, partly because I was lonely and partly because I was still fascinated by the relationship between technology and human connection. What began as a search for companionship became another artistic investigation. I wrote Finding Real, trying to understand whether love, friendship, and identity could exist inside a virtual world. Even there, without realizing it, I was still making art.

Then I became seriously ill. For almost a year I thought I might be dying. My weight dropped to around one hundred and twenty pounds. Eventually doctors discovered my gallbladder was failing. After surgery I slowly recovered, but the experience stripped away a great many illusions.

During this period I met Beatrice Lee in Second Life. Together we made the decision to move back to Minneapolis, yes in real, and leave the virtual world.

People sometimes ask why I came back.

The answer is simple.

Minneapolis was where people still knew me as an artist. It was where my community lived. It was where I believed I could begin again.

That rebuilding took years. My health was fragile. I had to rediscover both my confidence and my voice. But slowly, almost without noticing, I became myself again.

Looking back now, I finally understand the pattern that runs through all of this. Every major disappointment in my life came when I tried to become a businessman. Every period that gave my life meaning began when I returned to making art—not because it was profitable, but because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

That is why GH’s recent message affected me so deeply. You wrote that you wanted “to get beyond what now exists and create a new field of creativity with you all.”

Reading those words, I realized that we have arrived at the same place, though by different roads.

I no longer want to build another business. I don’t want to chase markets or startups or become an entrepreneur again. I want to help create a new field of creativity—a place where artists, writers, historians, and AI can think together in ways that were impossible when ArtNetWeb first began.

Perhaps that is what we were reaching toward all those years ago.

The technology wasn’t ready.

Maybe neither were we.

But today, for the first time since leaving New York, I feel that my life has come full circle. We finally have the chance to continue the conversation we began thirty years ago—by carrying its original spirit into a future none of us could have imagined back then.

That’s why I said yes.