ART & DESIGN PROJECTS
My interest in the design process extends beyond practical problem solving; I also enjoy creating musical instruments, drawing, making jewelry, and other projects that challenge my aesthetic and technical skills.
Selected Projects
CNC-Controlled Coffee Table Zen Garden
I created this piece as part of a summer exploration of the connection between art and technology. The table was principally built from a live-edge slab of black walnut, with wenge and leopardwood around the based. The interior contains a Raspberry Pi-controlled 2-axis gantry, with a magnet that drags the steel ball bearing through the sand. I wrote a web-based controller that allows the user to pick from amongst different patterns, with a blueprint and photo of each pattern, from a phone.
Motion-activated Lamp
This lamp is another effort in an exploration of the intersection of technology and design. It is made with sapele and curly maple, including a steam-bent upper section with rice-paper diffusers for the thirty RGB LEDs within. Two IR sensors between the upper and lower sections sense user motion to control intensity (by toggling three different sections of LEDs and gradations of intensity) and color (looping through several color choices). The electronics were custom-designed, built, and coded, and the lamp is controlled with an Arduino microcontroller.
Jewelry
I have made several necklaces, generally using metalwork and a somewhat primitivist aesthetic. From bending to soldering, polishing to painting and lacquering, shaping an art piece from nondescript copper and wire is an exercise is merging a vision with the realities of the properties of the materials. In some cases, I have also experimented with various chemical processes in order to give a desired patina to the copper surfaces.
Ukulele
Very much the culmination of many years of the acquisition of various fine woodworking skills, building a ukulele from scratch was a tremendous challenge and a joyful burden. From steam bending the sides to carving the neck to complicated assembly, binding, and inlay, every stage of this pushed my skills. The finished instrument is an acoustic-electric tenor ukulele.
Chaotic Drip Paintings
A collaboration with a student, this project was a look at automated drip paintings and chaos. After she read an article on fractal dimension in drip paintings - and how Pollock's drip paintings are distinguishable by their fractal dimension - we set out to recreate some of that research. She made canvases and a pendulum, and I designed an Arduino-driven stepper motor that periodically forced the pendulum's pivot point up and down, in an effort to cause the pendulum to have a chaotic motion. After the paintings were created, I wrote software with MATLAB to analyze the fractal dimension of each painting as a whole and each color layer. A poster details this process, including the analysis and the derivation proving chaotic motion.