Artist Biography

Joel Stover is an artist, performer, and storyteller whose work explores chaos theory, emergent complexity, and shamanic spiritual traditions. Through writing, video, and experimental software, he investigates how meaning forms — how identities emerge, collide, and reorganize within the wild systems of natural law.

He is the founder of A Wild Sort, an ongoing creative project devoted to cultivating constructive beliefs about human nature and our deep reverence for the universe. Our beliefs set the destination coordinates for our future.

Earlier in his career, Joel worked in software at companies including Mozilla and Google before returning to academic study in the life sciences, where he explored chemistry, virology, and bioinformatics while volunteering in hospitals, clinics, and street medicine. His path later took a difficult turn through addiction, isolation, and profound personal upheaval.

During this period of striking solitude, Joel was transformed by a spiritual awakening, receiving visions about the genesis of the universe and its evolution through bidirectional time. This initiation unfolded through a self-guided keening — a frenetic personal practice weaving tarot, astrology, and mediumship — funneling his experiences into an intense period of creative work in poetry, video, and algorithm.

Now based in the California desert, his work reflects a fascination with transformation: how collapse can give rise to new forms of meaning, creativity, and connection. He is currently working on his book Free to Move, a collection of pretty and absurd words narrating his passage through the disconnected, choppy geometry of lived experience.