Your background is in music. How did your focus shift to sculpture and electricity?

When I was working primarily on music, I often found myself frustrated with conforming to the various forms and contexts in which it exists. People have made music for millenia, but thanks to modern recording technology, it’s now much more easily accessible. The democratization of music production and distribution tools means that people produce and share more new music than ever. I don’t know if it’s possible for a medium to be more oversaturated. In this context, a lot of music exists primarily as content for various streaming platforms and goes completely unheard if not. Listeners won’t give it a chance compared to the millions of other options they have. Because of this, artists have to conform to perceptual loudness standards when mastering their music or worry about translating well to those types of platforms. It all felt very limiting for me and hard to produce anything truly exciting or new. 

At the same time, I taught myself how to design guitar pedals and synthesizers, which is what I do for a living now. I found myself really appreciating these objects as something beautiful in their own right, equally or perhaps moreso than any of the music created with them. As systems for sound creation, I also sensed something infinite — they seemed to contain a world of organic possibility, and in that way they possessed lives of their own. Something clicked for me when I began finding ways to translate this sensation into art. The medium felt really fresh and new and full of possibility, and compared to my experiences in an oversaturated field like music, that was very exciting.

Another big part of the trajectory was working at Meow Wolf, which is a company that builds psychedelic theme parks. I spent two years in New Mexico working as a sound technologist, in a role that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It was weird. But working in that medium — which in corporate terms is themed entertainment and in more artistic terms is immersive art — opened my eyes to what can exist and what creativity could be.

The audio component of the work seems to be a big part of this too.

Definitely. If we look at a recent piece of mine, Blind Choir, I’ve built a singing choir of sixteen electronic wasps. I refer to them as a “singing swarm” because each wasp uses a plasma speaker to emit sound — a high voltage transformer circuit that creates a beam of plasma which bridges the air gap between two electrodes. To create the plasma beam, the transformer wants to be driven with a high frequency above the range of human hearing, something like 32 kHz. But by toggling that high frequency on and off at a lower audio rate, say 100 Hz, you’ll get the sound of a pitched oscillator, hence a plasma speaker. Since the air gap is bridged so many times per second, you hear it as a musical pitch. And because a large part of what you hear is above the audible range, our brains don’t understand it too well. It has an interesting effect psychoacoustically. Combined with the spatial aspect of the sculpture, this sound makes for a physically rich sonic experience.

How are you controlling it? I imagine you don’t want to sit at a gallery and turn the knobs eight hours a day.

Right. I’m a big proponent of making all my pieces as plug-and-play as possible. There’s a straightforward on and off switch, a single power input, and the rest happens internally within the sculpture itself. This piece has a central hive controller that produces an individual audio output for each wasp. It’s running a generative program that comes up with harmonic frequencies and pans them across the surface of the swarm. The algorithm is based on another piece I did called Choir-64, which has 64 spatialized one-bit audio channels and uses regular speakers instead of plasma. Both pieces run programs that build generative harmonies over time in order to create a long-form spatial drone.

Choir-64 is still in my bedroom because I had to have some flair left in there after moving everything to the studio.

The wasps in Blind Choir are stunning, but they’re also installed into a beautiful piece of wood that has what looks like veins or tree branches running through it. How did you achieve this effect?

For that I use a high voltage process called Lichtenberg burning. Essentially, I run electricity through wood, and it finds the path of least resistance in the material. The heat generated by the resistance burns the wood away, creating a burning path between the two electrodes you place on the surface. 

Many woodworking associations have actually banned this technique because a lot of people have died doing it. But that’s because people in the past mostly used repurposed components from old microwaves or other appliances they took apart back in the day. The modern method uses a neon transformer, which is still high voltage but low current, and therefore a lot safer. I’ve accidentally touched the output of my rig before. It was intense, but I’m still here.

Getting shocked is honestly kind of fun when it happens. It’s like touching an outlet — maybe a little more extreme than that. But not the sort of thing you want to do on purpose. Mainly because if something did happen — then you could die.

Does it feel like the sting of an insect? You seem to have a thing for bugs.

Insects are animals of very questionable individuality. For example, in a hive of bees — it’s indeterminate whether a single worker bee is an individual or merely an extension of the Queen’s body. I think that’s a poignant metaphor for individuals within the larger context of a civilization — especially during this time, when we’re very self-aware about large scale issues, but everything still feels outside of our control.

I explore this idea in Modular Triptych: Blind Legions. Insects, bees in particular, are the titular blind legions, fated to live and work and die within a system. Using the behavior of circuitry, the piece tells the narrative of an apocalyptic event triggered by the uncontrolled growth of civilization. In the center of the triptych is a swarming behavior model in the shape of a honeycomb that charges two meters on either side panel, which in turn provide a control signal that increases the speed and activity of the central swarm. This relationship creates an exponentially increasing curve where the swarm builds to the point of frenzy when the charging is complete. At this point, two bug zappers trigger in a loud, explosive sequence that lasts for about half a minute.

Blind Legions represents the exponential technological curve we are currently experiencing. At first, technological progress creeps along at a steady pace, but when society advances to a state of accelerated information sharing, technology increases more rapidly, exponentially building and compounding on itself. The idea is that when this growth reaches an unsustainable point, you have an apocalypse event, and destruction takes place, represented in this piece by the climactic zapper moment. 

It’s the first time I’ve seen bug zappers used in an art piece, and it might be the most brilliant use conceived for them. How did you reach this conclusion?

The objective physicality of the idea inspires me. With music, value is very subjective. But something like a bug zapper is objective. If you touch it, it will shock you. If a bug touches it, it will die. It physically produces an arc of plasma and changes the chemical nature of the air around it. Something about that is very attractive and inspiring to me. Since this medium is so new, there is a lot of freedom in it, especially when you compare it to something like music that is so heavily formalized and contextualized.

This medium is new, but do you also incorporate historical context into your work? Your triptychs tend to include medieval motifs.

I care about narrative content. I am a fan of Lingua Ignota and Joanna Newsom, artists who have deep lyrics that are given emotional weight by the musical element. Their primary focus is to tell you a story. This was the point for me when creating music — the narrative content. I think this has translated in other ways into my sound sculptures.

The medieval imagery ties into a big part of my artistic philosophy, which is that technology and magic are one in the same. Science fiction writers discuss this trope often. As technology and magic grow in complexity and power, they become the same thing. We refer to something unknown as magic when it doesn’t work or when we don’t believe in it. We refer to the same phenomena as technology when it does, or when we believe it to be real.

We have devices like cell phones, which exist at a level of complexity where no individual working on them fully understands all the components. But those engineers trust that every part will work in conjunction, and somehow the device comes together and functions fine. Likewise, when I’m working with electronics, I’m dealing with prefabricated components, all of which have a chemical or engineering basis that I don’t necessarily understand because I don’t have to.

Total comprehension by an individual becomes impossible. Electricity itself is an invisible energy that works in ways that we don’t fully understand. I can debug and understand a circuit by using measurement tools. But what about the person who made the first voltmeter? The first oscilloscope? How did they know that they were working correctly when they didn’t have those tools in the first place? 

If we trace the lineage of measurement back far enough, we ultimately find that the basis for our understanding lies in formerly unprecedented trial and error. We work with what we can understand around us, which is ultimately very finite compared to this larger universal mystery. So there’s a very spiritual element to technology and magic that I try to capture in my work. 

Additionally, the medieval imagery invokes the sense of apocalyptic fatalism we experience when confronted with the chthonic or unsustainable nature of systems much larger than ourselves. The pieces comment on the existential realities of life within a globalized industrial economy, fabricated from materials that are a direct product, and therefore an apt representation, of that economy. The end result is a series of objects in which the visual aesthetic, the electronic functionality, and the medium of their creation all contribute to the overall meaning.

Consider your piece, Modular Triptych: Great Wurm. What ideas are flowing into this one, and how does medieval symbolism take shape?

I tend to be pretty detailed with the symbolism I use. Two knaves rest in the outer panels, crushed by the weight of the world and the cruel moon, respectively. The center panel features the Ouroboros, which is a prevalent ancient motif of a serpent eating its own tail, the Great Wurm that encircles the world. Here it encircles a medieval motif called the chain of being, which represents the hierarchy of life from minerals and plants up to humans and angels. 

This symbolism was inspired by an idea I encountered in a later reprinting of History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. The forward essay compared medieval thought about the notion of time with post-Renaissance and modern thinking. Modern thinking assumes that time moves in a forward direction, representative of progress towards a more rational society, greater technological advancements, and a more prosperous future. This was a big change from medieval thinking, which appreciated time as a descent, a falling away from what came before. They believed that humanity was moving away from the cultural heights of the classical era, the technological heights of the Roman era, the spiritual heights of the Saints and early Church fathers, Jesus Christ’s presence on Earth, and ultimately the Garden of Eden, which is the closest humans ever came to God. 

Basically, in medieval thought, we get further away from where we spiritually need to be, and the idea of an apocalypse becomes necessary as a solution to this descent. This is in contrast with modern vision of apocalypse that are usually based around uncontrolled or unsustainable progress (nuclear war, climate fallout, etc.). 

Great Wurm uses the Shepard tone, an audio illusionary technique that creates the impression of an infinitely ascending or descending pitch, as an illustrative means to analyze these historical viewpoints on progress and the passage of time. Each side panel plays a separate Shepard tone, one ascending, one descending. When they’re combined in their infinite aspect, it represents a more impassive, wide angle viewpoint of time on a divine or cosmic scale.

Do you think we’re on the precipice of an apocalypse? Of global collapse?

With all I’ve said so far, the second piece we discussed, Blind Legions, is actually a poor representation of how civilization-wide apocalypses occur or how we predict them to take place. As a piece, I like what it does, and ultimately I think it’s more about the narratives surrounding our idea of the apocalypse than an actual scale model. But in terms of how collapse actually works, it’s less of a sudden, climactic event out of nowhere, and more like a motion of falling down stairs.

Edward Gibbons refers to the prosperous Antonine period at the height of the Roman Empire as the happiest era for mankind. Life was relatively good compared to other time periods in the region. It took roughly 200-300 years for this stable period of the Western Empire to eventually collapse. In the east, the ‘Roman’ Empire lasted in one form or another until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This was a long period of decline, a gradual change, marked by widespread instability and reoccurring disasters, but also occasional moments of stabilization. By no means was there a sudden transition into the feudal order that followed. The people living through this period would have processed these various shifts and changes on their own immediate terms. Without the clarity of hindsight, they might not have even recognized the overall pattern of the events they were living through.

Where do you think this disconnect in perception comes from? And do you think that something better is yet to come, or rather, do you think we’ll reach Eden in a sense?

I think our apocalyptic anxieties stem from two places. One is the traditional religious idea that an apocalypse is an instantaneous event. One day the heavens open up, and something crazy happens. Bones fly out of the ground and cities burn. That’s one conception. The other one in the cultural consciousness is the big threat of the 20th century: nuclear war and all-out ground warfare. Those ideas color people’s perception of how apocalypses work.

People often view climate change as a ‘when is it going to happen?’ kind of phenomenon. But it’s not like that. It’s happening now. The process of adapting is and will easily be very scary, violent, and not good to live through at all. But it’s not going to be a hard break from the old world. You’ll have places like Russia potentially utilizing arable land in Siberia once the permafrost melts, and other such adaptations. This transition process will be tumultuous and chaotic, and therefore a very difficult time for most ordinary people. But something where the entire human race is wiped out seems rather unlikely to me as a result of climate change. The human race as a whole is a bit too adaptable.

To be clear, it will be very unfortunate for many people. I don’t think it’s good that it’s going to be this way. Certainly not. We’ll likely see government entities doing what they do best. They’ll get power by serving power and doing whatever they need to do to maintain their influence. And everyone else will live through it as best we can.

But to answer your other question, in terms of Eden, I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re ever going to get there.