The masks in the 3 Builders series - Circulo, Cuadrado and Triàngulo - relate to masking traditions in Africa, Oceania and the Americas and their foundational importance to the Modernist art movement. By applying principles of modernist abstraction to masks and using new media to inhabit them with personalities, the 3 Builders contextualize modernism and interactive art practices not as discreet, novel categories, but as the continuation of the traditions that inspired them.

Banding and flickering is visible in some photos and video due to a mismatch between the camera’s frame rate and the frequency of the displays.

The sprite mask sculptures employ minimal, abstracted facial structures with screens that animate key features by cycling semi-randomly through a small number of sequences; despite their formal simplicity, this combination of features is enough to perceive the masks experiencing and expressing complex emotions. Each sprite embodies a different state of mind, animated through converted footage of the artist’s features.

Banding and flickering is visible in some photos and video due to a mismatch between the camera’s frame rate and the frequency of the displays.

Identity Mask creates a digital facial composite to disguise its wearer. In a process inspired by character creation menus in role-playing games and profile generation on social networking platforms, the user adjusts sliders for different physical attributes on a detachable touchscreen to control the mask’s appearance; its screens load and display corresponding features taken from a facial-recognition training dataset.

A Mask for Late-Stage Capitalism confronts biased and predatory aspects of algorithmic advertising, displaying categories of data monetized by Facebook’s targeted ad services to literally mask its wearer. Each of the mask’s 12 LCD screens is dedicated to a category of targetable personal information, ranging from the from the benign (age, primary language) to intrusive (algorithmically-inferred “major life events”) to dangerous (psychological state, GPS coordinates). The wearer can cycle through multiple individuals’ datasets by turning a knob over the left ear, adopting a new, algorithmically-relevant persona with the (literally) superficial presentation of (figuratively) superficial data.

Diamond Supercut satirizes the emptiness of products that only exist to broadcast their own cost. The necklace incorporates seven OLED screens in a series of plastic links, connected to power and data through a repurposed ethernet cable doubling as a rope chain. The three larger vertical displays show media clips of the word “diamond” interspersed with diagrams of gem cuts; the four horizontal screens play a looping animation inspired by jewelers’ signage in downtown Brooklyn.

Try Me examines the relationship between human and digital forms of communication by with a linguistically ambiguous message (the titular “try me”) visually expressed using eight methods across 11 screens. These methods span from digital/mechanical (morse code, semaphore, optical scan codes) to analog (text, speech, sign language, and nonverbal cues). The large screen at center is a hybrid of both, an animation of my own lips speaking the phrase that was reconstituted frame-by-frame using an early version the Stable Diffusion AI. This animation never repeats the same way twice, randomly choosing the frames and animation speed every time it loops.

You Are Here is a vision of the universe in which its viewer is the only inhabitant, offering a shrine-like space to contemplate solitude as a philosophical quantum state. Viewers enter the installation alone, and are faced with video surveillance of their location from five increasingly distant perspectives. One is a live feed captured by a camera inside the installation, while the other four are pre-recorded loops altered to remove any signs of human activity. Viewers can only empirically assess the reality of the live feed; while they remain isolated in the installation, they philosophically exist in both the shared universe they perceived before entering and the empty one shown on the screens.

Ball Drop expresses social anxiety through its physiological response to stressful stimuli - in this case, sudden noises. A microphone wired to an Arduino micro-controller continually monitors sound levels, which responds to sudden spikes in volume by retracting the ball towards the ceiling. It remains withdrawn for a brief period, which increases recursively if the sculpture is triggered again before re-extending; particularly loud and disruptive environments may “frighten” the robot into retracting for prolonged periods before determining it is “safe” to drop again. Biomorphic aspects of the design belie the simplicity of the underlying program, conveying a sense of agency that renders its behaviors eerily organic.

Station consists of a modified drone trapped in a Sisyphean cycle ending in its own destruction. The drone is impaled by a copper pipe extending from an electrified metal platform. Its battery and control circuits are replaced with hanging, weighted wires, which power the drone by forming a circuit between the pipe passing through it and the platform below. Whenever the drone rises higher than these wires’ length it breaks the circuit, causing it to crash back to the ground; “crashing” brings the wires back in contact with the platform, restarting a cycle that ends only after the drone is crippled by the violence of its own movement.

The Voices He Hears examines epistemic closure through its examplar, Donald Trump. Its osentatious gold frame surrounds a screen which shows the President fidgeting behind a podium labeled “Tell Me”, which is mounted above a brass plaque commemorating the “Most Presidential all-time Greatest Listening Tour.” A microphone extends from below the frame, soliciting input from viewers, but whenever a viewer speaks into it they are loudly interrupted by audio of conservative media stars and politicians praising the President, which he responds to approvingly. This frustrating interaction emphasizes the absurdities and delusions reinforced by the closed loop of conservative media, as well as the danger of granting power to, in the words of former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, “a fucking idiot.”

Millennial Mandala combines sprite graphics extracted from classic videogames with clips from YouTube videos uploaded by popular streamers, creating an ersatz mandala for the information age. Mandalas are devotional objects in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Shinto traditions that present sacred symbols and figures in hierarchical geometric configurations, often used to focus meditation and induce spiritual trances. This format seemed ideal to communicate the koan-like paradox intrinsic to streaming as a form of entertainment: solitary observation of a solitary player, conducted from a distance and largely in silence.

Every year since 2020 I’ve designed and produced a special Christmas ornament for friends and family. They started out simple, but over time I started using them as opportunities to try out new styles and materials.

Apart from electrical and hanging hardware, the Kink chandelier is made entirely of 3D-printed components. The removable diffusers are printed “spiral vase” style to be thin and sturdy, while the central cluster is made from parts that were sanded smooth and painted. Each of the twelve bulbs is individually addressable and full-spectrum, allowing an incredible variety of lighting schemes from a single fixture.

My landlord replaced the obsolete lighting in my building’s stairwell with ugly, intolerably bright porch fixtures, so I designed lightweight diffusers to cover them up. The modular, stacking white shades are efficiently 3D-printed with a single wall and no supports, and secured by laser-cut acrylic ribs that rest into a fitted bracket, meaning no part of the original fixture is damaged, removed or replaced.

The Ironclad has a solid wood chassis sheathed in reverse-bolted blackened steel panels, and was inspired by modern camp furniture designs by Yoav Liberman as well as the namesake armored ships of the 19th century. The vibrant sapele mahogany was chosen for its contrast with the brutalist and austere steel surrounding and supporting it.

Furniture in the Perimeter series is made with same four components: solid white oak, 2-inch steel bar, weld nuts and stainless steel bolts. This adaptable, minimalist design language used principles of standardized production to produce fine furniture pieces that were affordable and highly customizable.

Stockpile Designs was a line of furniture and lighting derived from US military surplus material, inspired by postmodern designers Philppe Starck and Ingo Maurer as well as wartime folk art from WWI through Vietnam. Over the years I produced pieces for clients from international firms to Air Force squadrons, and my designs were featured in outlets including New York Magazine, Gizmodo and VH1. I ceased operating Stockpile as a consumer-facing brand in 2018 to attend graduate school.