sculpture

monoliths

I've made 2 monoliths over the years. Click through for more pics and the story behind them.

video triptych

For my final project of my experimental video independent study course at UVM, I built an interactive video triptych. This consisted of a projector, a video camera, a computer, 3 televisions, 3 composite video switch boxes, 9 VCRS and more cables than I care to remember. It is embarrassing to say the least that I have very little record of this piece. Thusly I will walk you through what the audience experienced during the showing:

As everyone is sitting down analog static is being projected onto a screen in the front of the room, above a row of 3 TVs. I fiddle with some cables and appear worried that I cannot get it to work. Slowly out of the static, shapes start to form. Soon a long hallway is seen. The video slowly transitions into a few different scenes I composed to show off video effects I had learned over the semester. They were all tied together through the theme of recursion. Slowly the video starts transitioning to a scene of a gray wall with some TVs layered into infinity. At the precise moment, I secretly switch the projector video feed over to a camera in the room pointed at the video screen. This cannot be detected because the last frames of the video are the same as what the camera is seeing currently. In this way I've created a seamless transition between the video and the experience of watching the video. From my notes I read from when presenting this, "It's not really about the content. The content is a substrate on top of which I experiment with meta recursive effects. The content is not always related to the effect. I tried."

After the video I turn on the triptych portion. Each TV can play video from one of 3 VCRs. One VCR plays a video of my roommate Dave drinking out of a bowl imperceptibly slow. The VCR immediately to the right of this VCR plays a video of a group of people watching this video. This plays on the second TV when selected. The next VCR to the right plays a video of a group of people watching the video of the other group of people watching the video of Dave drinking out of the bowl. The other VCRs have similar videos of levels of recursion.

The audience was invited to interact with the sculpture. Later that day it was disassembled.

paper fan

Paper fan, 2009
Created as a tchotchke give-away during a hot movie at the climax of a heat wave at F Cinema, 2009.

crosswalk signal

(rollover image)
I make lamps out of recycled crosswalk signals. Hand and walking man are independently controlled. Accepts regular screw on light bulbs. They are for sale on a build to order basis, $100.

harddrive enclosure

These pictures are terrible. Some time around 2003 my friend Andrew and I built an external hard drive enclosure into a cassette briefcase. We mounted the LEDs in the case and upgraded the fan. The original 160gb hard drive is still running to this day. It's fun because you can open it up really easily. It's not really a sculpture but this is the only section it really fits on this site.