applied poetics is emotionally resonant curation
of words, visuals, experiences + processes
I once rode in a homemade submarine through the canals of Copenhagen with a member of the Danish Royal Navy and a madman to go visit an engineer who just finished building a walking house. I helped assemble a hands-on science museum in Turkey during an attempted military coup and found refuge in a community of well-read anarchists, sufis and musicians dancing for nine days straight. I directed a crowdsourced, abstract musical aboard art rafts made of trash while crashing the Venice biennale after crossing the Adriatic Sea. I watched from the Seine as Notre Dame burned on my birthday. I performed Russian butoh in subzero temperatures wearing a pig’s spine and improvised a ten-minute performance art piece featuring the audience in an abandoned copper mine in Finland. Also I do weddings.
What makes us laugh, what makes us cry. What attracts, what repels. What makes us stand up and take action. And what gets remembered. I’ve written and performed hundreds of shows, songs and poems for audiences at home and abroad, all the while learning more and more that there is indeed something that unites us all and it is composed primarily of the small, specific and weird. I’ve also learned a great deal about how these things can all come together to make something wonderful. This is a field of study which I have come to call Applied Poetics.
STORY FOR A LIVING
me as the third person
As a writer, designer, curator and poet, Benjamin Burke helps scientists, artists and community builders find their voice and use it. Informed by an interdisciplinary background in the performing arts, visual arts, music, design, public relations, advertising and large-scale community-based projects, Benjamin has implemented his self-described approach of Applied Poetics for communities in the United States, Italy, Finland, Taiwan, India, Nepal, Chile, Tasmania and Antarctica. Recent projects include Dhun, a novel humanist living development project in Rajasthan, India; Embrace Global, a nonprofit which ships its innovative portable incubator system for newborns in response to humanitarian emergencies worldwide; and Sunlight, a film and story studio for science advocacy which he cofounded with Robby Piantanida of Ambient Film.
Benjamin’s artwork has been exhibited at the California Academy of Sciences, the Exploratorium, Chabot Observatory, the DeYoung Museum, the SFMOMA Koret Visitor’s Center, Google’s Curiosity Camp and the Spectra Lunar Mission at Lunares Research Station in Pila, Poland. He is a 2013 TED Fellow and his poems have been published in Garbology: Our Love Affair with Trash and the Turkish literary journal Buzdokuz. His latest project, Shape of the Moon, is releasing its debut album on Marionette Records in June of 2026.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in Universal Design from the University of California at Davis — a self-directed degree incorporating behavioral science, environmental design, early childhood education, graphic design, costume design, visual merchandising, photography and fine art.