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BAM NewsApril 22 2008

A quick post with some images of the installation I am working on for a party celebrating the 30 anniversary of Matrix, the contemporary art wing of the Berkeley Art Museum. One of my favorite bands, Deerhoof, is playing at the party. Here are some early images of the scheme. Basically, what can you do with 15,000 feet of rope?

Current scheme

EOES V2March 25 2008

I’ve just completed the second version of the set for Tahni Holt’s dance piece “Endless Ocean Endless Sky” or as I call it EOES. This is exactly the same as the first one with the exception of being a few feet longer. The next performance is coming up in April and there are plans to bring it to San Francisco next fall.

I’ve been lucky to have two great spaces to build each of the inflatables. The central space at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU and the Nave at CCA are perfect for building large inflatables.

Photos and Video by Tan Nguyen. Many thanks to the fabrication crew: Josh Campos, Tan Nguyen, Michael Wlosek, John Hobart Culleton, and Chris Chalmers.

ACADIA 2008 Website now live!January 11 2008

In one of my other roles as technical co-chair of the upcoming ACADIA 2008 conference, I’ve recently put together a conference website. Still lots more content to come, but this is a start. The conference title is Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation. We are interested in looking at the range of ways designers and researchers have extracted principles from biology to create new materials, forms, and processes. We have a great line up of keynote speakers (which will be released soon). I’m also really excited to be working with a great group of people in organizing this conference. These include Neri Oxman (MIT), Marc Swackhamer (UMinn), Billie Faircloth (UT Austin), and Kiel Moe (Northeastern).

Image by Peter Theakston.

Works in ProgressJanuary 3 2008

In a response to one of my New Year’s resolutions to update this website more regularly, here are a few images of the some the projects I’m working on in my limited free time.

This first project is a collaboration with Andre Caradec of SUMARCH and Neil Schwartz of Schwartz and Architecture for a staircase railing milled from 2″ thick material. The project explores differential views as one moves up and down the stairs. One of the desires was to create a perforated surface that does not rely on a standard underlaying grid. Rather, the script iteratively subdivides the area into semi-random blocks when are then recursively subdivided again for one or two more generations. Some of the images below stray pretty far from the actual project and rather explore the limits of the script.

Here is an image from the original script that I wrote last winter.

And here is what the heavily modified script produces.

The 4 images below come from SUMARCH

New Site!January 2 2008

It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally found the time to update the site from flash-based to wordpress-driven. It may not be as “flashy” but wordpress is so much more convenient for day to day use and updating. Flash is interesting and pretty, but beyond that it isn’t so useful. This site will allow me to update the site much more often as well as allow more feedback with the world. Let me know what you think. An archive of the older site can be found here.

Also, I am experimenting with a theme called Recycled Canvas developed at the MIT MediaLab. I’m still unsure what they are trying to do with it but so far it enabled me to create a fairly unique blog quickly.