We recently connected with Dalton Sessumes and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Dalton thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I first knew that I wanted to pursue a creative path professionally when I found myself sitting on the kitchen floor in my tiny college apartment, casting circus props I invented out of specialty urethane rubber instead of studying for my upcoming PhD. qualifying exams. I was in graduate school at the time on the path to become a PhD. quantum physicist. I was doing large scale experiments with particle accelerators, working at national laboratories, and barely making it through my classes as my circus arts “hobby” slowly grew. Often times, I found myself doing homework or studying on the road as I traveled across the country to learn from the nation’s greatest instructors and when i was lucky, perform with them. But I had never thought of it as my career until this pivotal moment on my kitchen floor. Looking up at the glow of my computer screen, well into the early morning hours, I consciously chose my own creative project over the safe and socially accepted life course that had been set for me. Shortly afterwards, I failed my PhD qualifying exams, instead opting for a master’s degree and passing with flying colors (mostly because I knew this was the end). I then spent the next 6 months after graduation touring the country and going completely broke in the process. By the end of the tour, all my accounts had reached zero just as I received an email from Cirque du Soleil offering me a touring position on one of their cruise ship shows as a solo artist. Since then, my career has taken off (despite covid), and I’ve found ways to reintegrate my education in physics into my artwork through the use of emerging and complex technologies applied to the performing arts and experiential industry.

Dalton, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My name is Dalton Sessumes, and I am a circus artist, technologist, and futurist. I perform mainly with an apparatus called the leviwand, which mixes a magically floating rod with dancing and acrobatics, and I also perform with fire, colored smoke, and light. I founded my company MindWorks in 2017, and we focus on uniting performing arts like dance, circus, and live music with cutting edge emerging technologies like holograms, AR/VR, drone swarms, AI, light projection, and interactive/immersive art experiences. I studied engineering, technology, and physics my entire life through graduate school, and once I started gradually integrating myself with circus by learning and performing with leviwand at music festivals around the country, my course was set to eventually unite my two passions into a brand we lovingly call “tech circus.” I think we bring a special dimension of experience to our clients by mixing live performance with cutting edge art, moving past the 3 dimensions where visual art traditionally exists and into the 4th dimension where bespoke, transitory performances activate moments in time together with the art around them. The energy that exists in that moment between the art, the performers, and our guests is what lights us up. We are proud to have activated events for some of the biggest brands in the world, and we are excited to be piecing together our first feature length circus show aimed for 2025.

: Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Ultimately, my goal is to be an example that you have the power to turn your imagination into your everyday life. I see so many people that wake up, go to work, come home, watch Netflix, and go to bed, just to repeat it all the next day. We as humans are so much more than a cog in a corporate machine, toiling away for other people’s dreams until we retire or die. Being a future-forward company, I also recognize that very soon there won’t be any need for the “humans as cogs” paradigm. We will have machines for many of even the most complex tasks that people do to make money now. AI can already do up to 80% of jobs globally, and we’re just waiting on infrastructure. 80% is a paradigm-changing number. So with the vast majority of jobs becoming automated, the question becomes- what do we do when we no longer work? What did we do as a society before we decided that the definition of success and good citizenship was to show up at a job every day? The data shows that when we don’t have to worry, we create. We become artists. My dream is to show others that they can create what they dream now, thus changing their lives into what they ultimately desire them to be and bringing their imagination to life on a grand scale.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I view NFTs, and by extent web 3.0 as whole, as a necessary evolution of the virtual ecosystem. It comes with significant hurdles- energy dependency, mass adoption, and the typical hurdles that plague any new tech development as society pushes to adopt it, such as security, resiliency, and extent of adoption. There are many features of web 2.0 that worked well on their own, but what NFTs popularized was a digital infrastructure that can be used far beyond the current adoption for digital characters and yacht clubs. The art world has seen the most immediate effects of NFT adoption, creating millionaires while breaking others. However, as the infrastructure grows, we will begin to see the advantages that systems like global currencies, AR/VR applications, and the upcoming web 3.0 digital world.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mindworksarts.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/mindworksarts
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindworksarts
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalton-sessumes-9a9aa358/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/daltonsessumes

Image Credits
All images belong to MindWorks