Obelisk
In so many of our lives, stillness is missing. The weekday morning is a rushed process: throwing on clothes, a quick cup of coffee or tea and out to start one’s day. Obelisk aims to bring back a careful moment of rest. Obelisk is more than a morning routine, it is an innovative use of robotics that brings together the ceremony of tea drinking with meditation.
Tea is inherently spiritual, both in substance and pratice. The beverage is consumed by an estimated 2 billion people everyday in countless ceremonies. As the revered Buddhist monk Popchong Sunim puts it, “Tea is a path to the universe.”
Obelisks too are paths to the universe; totems, spires and obelisks were built through millennia by disparate cultures, often with the intent of asking for or offering something. Egyptian, American Indian and Aztec culture, all constructed these objects to bring them closer with their deities.
Throughout the design process, I held the great minimalists in mind. The goal was to create a device that doesn’t demand attention, in size or form, that fits perfectly into the user’s space. Below are some of my design references.
Graph
Stock charts and corporate profit are oft removed from the physical world. Numbers in spreadsheets and lines on a screen do not capture real world consequences. When given a materiality, graphs become an interactive, immersive, almost sentient being.
Give graphs context and they become something else. Place Graph 01 alongside images of Boeing’s infamous and negligent crashes and feed it live-time stock price data and it begins to tell a visceral story.
Graph 01 is composed of found scrap wood, threaded bolts, washers, nuts, brass pulleys, fishing line, 5 SG90 servos, a powerful light diode and fiber-optic cable. Powered by a RasPi 4, servo controller and a portable battery.
Any live stock data can be imported from Yahoo Finance and represented on the graph. Updating every 10 seconds, viewers are kept up to date on market dynamics and breaking news.
Graph 01 is a reflection of the owner’s intentions. Hung in a corporate office, a wealthy man’s penthouse or Miami palace reflects the importance he places on material wealth.
Semiotics & Understanding
There is a magical line in perception, distinct to the individual, where a chair no longer can be considered a chair. Pulled apart, contorted, exploded, bent, broken, thrown out to sea, shot into space; there is a single point in time and space in which an object loses its status.
Semiotics is the study of symbols and in how signals and references are used in communication with others. In the context of a dismantled chair, it’s “chair-ness” is understood by the individual, and dependent on one’s experience, understanding and even mood.
The issue of identity and understanding arises when two people perceive the same object to be two different ones. This dichotomy opens for an uneasiness that can be extended and manipulated into fear and anger.
When dealing with something trivial, like “chair-ness,” it is comical to imagine conflict arising, but less so when it comes to religious symbols, cultural artifacts or political happenings. In the 21st century, the abundance of mass-media and instant communication has dulled our senses to new information, blurring the lines of what is real and not.
In attempts to yield truth, powerful people across geographic and cultural lines manipulate information for personal or political gain. To counteract bad-actors in our world, it is good to practice analysis of the mundane – to slow down and ground us in perception.
Content Exoskeleton
Content is everywhere. It is the new currency.
Money is important, yes, but content is the engine of human productivity. People still want things, of course, but all in service of human attention. There are still real problems on earth, no doubt, but the wealthy top 20% have settled their desires. That is entertainment.
The newest content product serves to blend the physical with the digital. “Why make content when you can be content?”. The Content Exoskeleton was designed in the year 2052, when people’s lives entirely revolve around producing and consuming entertainment.
By filming the subject from both the front and top down perspective, nothing is lost in the subject’s lived reality. Audiences are allowed to experience the subject’s life as closely as possible, not missing a second of thrilling content! In this project, I engaged with the public in large public squares, parks, storefronts and at parties.
Most were receptive, though some were put-off by the idea of being recorded in public. Other’s commented that the form of the Exoskeleton might be cumbersome for daily use. In wearing the Content Exoskeleton for hours, I have taken away that neither society nor the user is quite ready for a life singularly dedicated to content production.
Camper Magazine
A psychogeographical walk through the places, spaces, and faces of our fledgling minds.
Completed in combination with designer Jake Kaliszewski, the Camper magazine is a collection of artists, writers, researchers and thinkers all producing thought-provoking works under one tent.
The magazine has featured articles written about conspiracy theorists, a research biologist catching bullfrogs, fiction pieces about future automatons and writers with magical powers as well as more subtle explorations with recipes, paintings and live events.
The Camper Magazine aims to bite large and chew big by capturing the many aspects of lives lived fully. The second issue was released in Winter of 2024 and featured a release party with contributors and consumers alike.
Scorched Wine Rack
California’s wine country wholly represents humanity’s compulsive desire to wield nature for it’s own benefit.
Sonoma, Napa, Santa Barbara and Paso Robles sit in vulnerable foothills and valleys at near-yearly risk of inferno. The grapes grown in these regions are considered some of the best in the world, offering the right conditions of warm, sun-filled days and cool, fog-laden nights.
This climate also brings extraordinary viniculturist and wine makers, yielding special wines that demonstrate ‘terroir,” French for ‘soil’ or ‘earth.’
The scorched wine rack is physical manifestation of the complicated relationship between competing forces. Family friends of mine lost their vineyards and winery in the Tubbs Fire in 2017.
This one fire took nearly 5,500 structures, $1.2 billion in damage and the greater Northern California fires that year took 22 lives.
These fires are only exacerbated by a changing climate, with dryer, hotter summers which have effected California pronouncedly.
At the same time, climate change has opened up new opportunities for viniculture, with the takeoff in wine growing regions in formerly poor wine growing regions such as the UK, Scandinavia and Japan. As the climate changes, so does terroir, revealing the complicated dynamic between man and the world we are creating.
