I’m Dave Holt.
I create symbolic art on ancient petrified wood and stone.
I began developing this work in late 2019. Over time, it evolved into a symbolic practice built around an unusual convergence: ancient geological material, the direct human mark, and the experience of living through a period of accelerating technological and environmental change.
I think of this work as Future Tech Art.
The term does not describe art made by technology, nor does it refer to a particular futuristic visual style. It describes art made from within a technological civilization whose future is becoming increasingly difficult to predict.
We live in a period shaped by artificial intelligence, accelerating technology, environmental instability, social disruption, information saturation, and profound uncertainty about what comes next. My work does not attempt to illustrate these subjects or provide answers to them. They are part of the conditions from which the work emerges.
Against that contemporary experience, I work with materials of immense age.
Petrified wood and stone carry histories measured not in human lifetimes but in millions, sometimes billions, of years. Their fractures, mineral structures, irregular surfaces, coloration, erosion, pressure, rupture, and transformation existed long before I encountered them. I do not regard these materials simply as surfaces on which to paint.
The object is part of the artwork.
The symbols are applied directly by hand. They are not a conventional written language, planned narratives, or images with assigned translations. They develop subconsciously through repetition, instinct, observation, containment, and response to the individual geological object.
I do not attempt to explain what the symbols ultimately mean.
That uncertainty is intentional.
A symbol can suggest structure, movement, relationship, language, technology, ritual, mapping, communication, or something for which we do not yet have a useful category. But assigning a fixed meaning would close a question that I believe should remain open.
In that sense, the work moves simultaneously in two directions.
It reaches backward toward one of the oldest human impulses: making marks upon stone.
At the same time, it is being created by a person living in the twenty-first century—through pandemic, poverty, instability, technological acceleration, artificial intelligence, environmental change, collapse, rebuilding, and experiences that do not always submit easily to explanation.
The result can appear ancient and futuristic at once.
That tension is central to Future Tech Art.
It is not an attempt to predict what the future will look like. It is art produced from the experience of living at the threshold of a future we cannot yet understand.
The individual works are therefore not intended for immediate decoding. They are physical objects meant to be encountered over time. Distance, angle, changing light, mineral structure, painted surface, fracture, color, and symbol can reveal different relationships through sustained observation.
Ten people may live with the same object and encounter ten different possibilities within it. I do not consider that a failure of communication. It is part of the work.
There is value in not knowing.
There is value in allowing an object to remain partly unresolved.
Ancient material carries a history we can measure but never fully experience. A contemporary symbol occupies that material without completely explaining itself. Between those two things, the known and unknown, geological past and technological future, material and human mark, is where my work exists.
This site is the evolving archive of that practice: the objects, their geological and artistic records, writings, videos, and the continuing development of Future Tech Art.
— Dave Holt