Heaven + Earth + Joe Davis

Almost thirty years ago, a peg-legged artist and motorcycle mechanic from Mississippi walked into MITs Center for Advanced Visual Studies and demanded a meeting with the Director.

After trashing the receptionist's desk and holding off the Cambridge police, Joe Davis walked out with an academic appointment at MIT. His status there has provided him with resources for much of his work - including sending vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, poetry encoded into DNA, and a language to write the world beneath the world.

His gig at MIT is unpaid. He gets evicted from several apartments and loses his lab space to science. But perhaps his greatest obstacle is that people don't understand him.