We are each, in a profound sense, a living work of fiction.

Not in the dismissive sense. In the truest sense. Our experience of reality is constructed. Subjective. Shaped by every moment that preceded this one. No two people are living in quite the same world. No two people have the same story of you. And yet here we are, sharing one world all together.

The common (dictionary-based) understanding of empathy is the ability to understand how someone else feels. But that’s not possible: scientifically, it is a certainty that emotions are not universal. And when we frame empathy as creating understanding, we place the burden on whoever is furthest from the norm. That is not empathy. It may be why so many people feel exhausted by the attempt.

With that research knowledge and after studying 20,000+ people moving through my experiences - designed to put them briefly inside another person's reality - I’ve arrived at a different definition.

Empathy is the active acknowledgment that another person's fiction is as real and as meaningful as your own. Not the same. Not necessarily compatible. But valid. Even when you disagree vehemently.

That acknowledgment is not a feeling. It is a practice. And it is the collective agreement that makes genuine human connection possible at all. Art is an important medium to bring that reality to life.

And yet something gets in the way of empathic cultural flourishing.

Every social interaction carries invisible instructions. How to enter a room. When to speak and when to defer. What to reveal and what to keep carefully out of sight. These are modal norms: the unspoken rules that govern how we behave in the presence of others, enforced not by law but by the subtler and more powerful force of social expectation.

Modal norms are not the enemy. They make collective life navigable. But they come at a cost. The same norms that make us legible to each other also make us less available to each other. We perform. We signal. We manage impressions. And in doing so, we create a permanent distance between who we are and who we allow others to see.

Not out of dishonesty. Out of the accumulated habit of social survival.

Human art is a shedding of modal norms. Human Art is an area of creation designed to explore the depth of authentic human interaction.

When we make art we most often put it into a static object. A painting. A sculpture. Something that exists independently of the people around it. Or a performance: something designed to express more than what is already there. Human art is something else. It is art that goes into an interaction, involving what is here, now. The interaction itself becomes the artwork.

Most art is ‘what’ art. Human art is how art. The answering, ‘how can an experience allow us to be the most human - in the most authentic, artistic sense possible?’

The experience becomes a metaphorical door with an invitation to walk through it. A pill that dissolves into the body the moment we swallow it. It asks us to leave our modal norms at the door. Or depart with them along the way.

At its center is an attempt to allow at least one human -- the artwork -- to have no motivations toward the visitor. To be fully present. To respond authentically to themselves, having shed their own modal norms as much as possible. Nothing to teach. Nothing to prove.

Each visitor receives a different interaction. Shaped by what the artwork perceives in them, and by how the artwork genuinely feels in that moment, without explanation or justification.

The visitor will never know why their experience differed from the person beside them. But they will know they are inside an exploration of authentic humaning. And that this is mutually, completely okay.

Your results will vary.

Most art asks: what? Human art asks: how. How does it feel to be alive in this moment, in this space, alongside this person?

These are not questions the work answers. They are questions the work makes it possible, briefly, to live inside.

Human art exists for arts sake. But through it’s design to catalyze greater authenticity and empathy it also exists with a purpose to enliven prosocial emotional contagion.

The power of emotional contagion is highly undervalued, considering it’s societal impact. Emotions are not universal. Yet the endless versions of a an emotional concept move like weather patterns of organisms through society, every single day. All emotions have the capacity to sweep through society in this way.

We can understand this viscerally by considering how a virus moves through a population, as COVID taught us.

Contagion is not a metaphor. It is a mechanism. What we have spent far less scientific and active art-space energy on the other direction of positive, prosocial emotional contagion. Joy can be contagious. Genuine warmth is contagious. The felt sense that another person really sees you -- that spreads too.

When a human art experience sets the right conditions, this contagion moves through a room. It serves as a refreshing reminder that this quality of contact exists. And that reminder, carried out by the people who experienced it, has the potential to move beyond the museum space, back out through their community.

Positive emotional contagion through human art is my medium. It is the medium of many future others hopefully. I believe it lives best in a still unrealized segment of experiential offerings.

Experiential Art is rare and perhaps not even in it’s infancy.

Not all experiences are created equal. Some change us. Most don't. The ones that change us tend to share two qualities that are, structurally, in tension with each other: they are deep enough to matter, and they reach enough people to have consequence.

Depth and scale generally work against each other. The experiences that go deepest are almost by definition intimate and unscalable. The experiences that reach the most people tend toward the shallow end.

And yet there is a territory in the middle that remains largely unexplored. Experiences intimate enough to genuinely move people, and structured enough to reach thousands without losing what makes them work.

This is the territory I find most compelling. What is the minimum viable depth at which an experience can still genuinely change someone? And how do you build something that holds that depth while remaining accessible enough to matter at scale?

I believe that in a world of experiential possibilities - each that can define our collective future - that this is one of the most unrealized questions worth asking.