Art-Science Wizard Portfolio

OHM is the kinetic sculpture that I am building for Burning Man 2023. This is my first year being awarded an honoraria grant for helping me build my sculpture. I have been hard at work on it. I have already built a scaffold torus that will go into the 10 stainless steel rings to support them while they are being spring tethered to the outer decagon ring and to each other. I have also completed rolling the 10 stainless steel rings that make up the core of the project. Many of my sculptures involve kinetic movement that let people move through space in a unique way. OHM will use springs to allow the sculpture and people to vibrate as the torus turns end over end. I am designing a system to keep the rotational axis slower than last years project Buckyball. My next stages are to finish the pivots of the decagon ring and to build the spring grippers. I have ordered my lights and still have much to build and buy. Any financial help you would like to give is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

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Bucky Ball is the sculpture of a Carbon 60 molecule that I designed to spin on two stands with heavy duty axels. There are 90 round tube edges that have flange nuts welded to the ends so that the tubes would remain strong. There are 60 special interchangeable vertex units that allow the poles to bolt together with 5/8” grade 8 bolts. People loved playing on the structure and would explore the different balance properties that it took to make the whole ball roll over while they were holding on. Children fit more tightly into the hexagons and pentagons than adults and had great agility on the structure. The last image shows a group of climbers known as the Moab Monkeys all on at the same time. It was crazy to watch 2000 lbs of humans on 300 lbs of steel! But The structure held up great for the 7 days of Burning man and I would like to thank Jack Wahl especially for all his help in installing the sculpture and to Sydney Parcell and Levi Call for seeing me through deinstall. Levi Call also dedicated so much time to helping people go all the way around on the structure and was a great mentor and guide to many.

Space Polyp was my first officially placed Burning Man project. I built it entirely out of pocket. My friends QJ, Dustin and Martin helped me immensely with assembly and transport. I built the base in May and June and completed welding the seed top and 450 lb bottom swing a week before it was time to go out to the playa. Being in the seed while it swung around was an enlightening experience. At night the little crystal lights changed colors.

The Jupiter Gyro Minor went to Desert Hearts and then to Lightning In a Bottle 2019. It was positioned by the art clave between thunder and lightning stages and got a lot of attention. After those festivals, I designed tougher lights to illuminate the center part. The New arms made it heavier on top so I added 4 long feet and they were great at Desert Daze Festival as were the new lights.

Ascension 2.0 developed as an experiment in long light exposures with a sculpture. To make changes to the original Ascension, a center mast, a helicopter blade structure and two dual ring spinners were fabricated in 4 days to prepare for the Decompression 2018 event. The night before the event, Conor Molinare my helper and I worked all night making the electrical system that housed 3 mercury slip rings and sent power and data to the 4 rings. On November 23 and 24th Ascension was set up in front of the main stage of Insomniac’s Dream State trance festival in San Bernadino. Hundreds of people took photos standing on it and spun the wheel around with their friends.

Spacewave was my first large scale installation at a festival. I proposed to make a 30’ curtain covered in tiny hexagonal mirrors. I designed the truss structure to hold it up and Insomniac provided the truss and funding to build the project. A large 3’x4’ laser cutting bed at Noisebridge in SF was used to cut all 11,532 mirrors. The mirrors were glued to the canvas curtain using plastic templates to keep spacing even. 4people worked very hard for a week straight in my west Oakland warehouse to place all the mirrors. Then the project was rolled up on a big cardboard tube and driven to Las Vegas Motor speedway to be on Display at EDC2018 a large heavily populated music festival. I made a special metal rack that clamped to the truss and ropes through gromets that were punched into an extra strip of terp so that the heavy curtain wouldnt tear the gromets out. Playing with the structure is very satisfying as you can see in the videos.

Each of these lights is an exploration of different mediums to build platonic solid structures that are transparent and allow for an inspection of another geometric form that moves freely inside. Some of them emit light and some of them have light projected onto them.

The cymatics table uses percussive frequencies to vibrate the surface of liquids to render patterns across the surface.  By changing the frequency of the tone going to the speaker the ripples on the surface build on each other or erase each other in the wave processes of constructive or destructive interference. I kept careful notes about what frequencies made what patterns. sometimes patterns only appeared with the most subtle of amplitudes. 

Umbrellyfish was a way to be under a parachute without using a fan to keep it inflated. I thought only one person would turn it at a time. I designed and Built it in spring of 2016 and in May 2016 I installed it for 3 days on the San Mateo fairgrounds for Maker Faire. 

  For 3 days, kids of all ages held the crank wheel and raced around the pole to make the whole mechanism turn in one direction or the other. Once, I saw a father ask his daughter if she wanted to go do something else. She shook her and kept turning the wheel.

  I hadn't expected this to be so fun but I really like that it brought so much joy to the children.

In 2013 I built many water prisms with silicone and glass only. This tank in fall of 2015 was special because I designed it to be able to change orientation horizontal or vertical and to have a steel frame that would hold the glass and water. 

Using distilled water at the time has meant that it hasn't grown any life forms in the tank for 3 years and it still makes super bright rainbows with light from the sun.

The harmonograph is a pendulum driven machine that makes pretty drawings by controlling the frequencies of the pendulums. The frequency is changed by adjusting how far the weights are from the pivot point. This is the 5th harmonograph I have built. The first two wooden ones perished. The third wood one is in Virginia. The fourth aluminum one went to Maker Faire in 2013. This one built in fall 2015 survives today and still makes great drawings.  The 5 star drawing is a 3 rotation of table to 2 rotations of the pen ratio. The circular pattern is table still and pen moving only.

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The Big Mirror project began as Large mirror on a wall inside a bar that was closing down in San Francisco's Mission district. Once I got the mirror clean, I designed a steel frame that would protect the glass and support its immense weight.

While the mirror was leaning against the wall, I noticed that the glass flexed quite a bit from the force of gravity pulling down on the mass. I then decided to add a special cross to the back of the steel frame that would allow the glass to flex from the center of the mirror with out breaking the glass. An adjustable steel ring with a silicone buffer gently tugs the center of the mirror while thick foam padding protects the edges of the glass inside the polished steel frame.  All of this is held up by a heavy duty 4" square stock base. With heavy items it is very important to make the base capable of carrying the load. 

Sunlight striking the mirror will focus to an intense beam at 400 ft away. This provides an excellent light source for projecting spectrum through the water prism. 

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