Gathering 2011

24"l x 18"d x 38"h

Inspired by the motion of a jellyfish, I built this piece using the tooth of an excavation machine as its base. Above that, a series of mechanisms carries the operators input through a flywheel and several miter gears until it reaches the heart of the machine...

A Gentle Tug 2010

10"l x 10"d x 28"h

I have always been fascinated with gravity; such a weak force, but so visible, so ubiquitous. I often take heart knowing that just as the earth holds onto me with gravity, I also exert a very tiny force on it, as well as on the rest of the universe. I continue to explore...

Occasional Marbles 2010

18"l x 14"d x 24"h

This piece is about waiting, about build-up. The bulk of it is a barbell weight I found in a high school field, which had aquired a patina unmatchable except by age. The rest of the machine consists of two mechanisms: a motorized kicking foot which propels...

Wayward Calliope 2010

5'l x 6'd x 5'h

The children who come to Maker Faire are energetic, sometimes even frantic, and almost always curious. They will try anything, they just grab it and see what it does. I built this machine for them, for fun, and because I happened to have been toting around a...

The Corpse Reviver 2009

38"l x 38"d x 40"h

This machine mixes a Corpse Reviver #2 cocktail. I built it as part of an artist residency in Vienna in 2009 with the group Monochrom, which, along with the group Shifz, organizes the Roboexotica event every year: a festival of cocktail mixing robots, etc. When asked...

Geared Candleholder 2 2009

16"l x 5"d x 18"h

What began as a simple how-to article about making gears has turned into a major project article for Make Magazine and at last is published in volume 21. The project is candleholder with three gears and parallel action arms which move the candles up...

Manifold Ballast 2009

14"l x 5"d x 16"h

Manifold Ballast is a small kinetic sculpture featuring a flywheel, a lever & bellcrank actuator, and a geared-down second axle which carries a small figure in a spinning orbit around the upper half of the machine. Like much of my recent work, Manifold Ballast ...

Radio 2009

12"l x 6"w x 15"h

Radio is a small machine featuring a three-dimensional piston and a small figure mounted on a spring wire. This piece is another playful examination of human experience; the searching and answering, the trying and, occasionally, succeeding.

Forward to the End 2009

20"l x 3"d x 48"h

This mess of gears and levers, this contraption of linkage after linkage, serves to transport a small figure back and forth above the machine. It is another exploration of the huge, somewhat futile mechanisms at work behind the simple trajectory of a human life.

A Small Force 2008

36"w x 6"d x 34"h

One of the things that makes me feel good about the world around me is gravity. It is a very weak force, and yet every body of matter in space exerts gravitational force on every other body in space. That means you and I. We are pulling, at each other, at the...

The Kissing Machine 2008

Variable, approx. 10'w x 24"d x 4'h

This is a two-person interactive machine I built in early 2008. The operator side has a lever and a crank. The lever raises and lowers the kissing lips, while the crank extends the kissing arm. A second person stands in front of the kisser and gets a kiss and an...

Proxy Game 2007

24"l x 24"w x 8"h

This is a two-person interactive piece. Like the kissing machine, it is an exploration of mediated interaction. In this case, each participant operates one of the figures within the frame and chooses how to interact with the other figure. There is no object...

Elaboration of a Shortcoming 2007

42"l x 22"w x 48"h

Nerves in the human body transmit information very slowly. The slowest are those which deliver pain sensations-they work at around two feet per second. The fastest are those nerves which tell our brain where our body parts are. Somewhere in between...

Eating My Cake and Having It Too 2007

42"l x 14"w x 36"h

I never understood the phrase, "You can't have your cake and eat it too." It seemed to me that eating the cake was the ultimate form of possessing it. We put things in our mouth, or touch them with our mouth, as a way of claming possession. These thoughts were...

No Reward For Good Behavior 2006

8"l x 8"w x 7"h

One of the things that impresses me most in other people is seeing someone passionately engaged in a fruitless activity. When someone is obsessed with something even though there is no benefit, whether selfish or altrusitic, other than the simple feeling... 

It's The Things You Can't Change That Shape You 2006

12"l x 4"d x 14"h

This piece, like A Series of Arbitrary But Passionate Decisions, deals with the tenuousness of the idea of a deliberate life. The paradox of its elaborate creation and its gratuitous movement are meant...

Some People I Don't Know 2006

16"l x 16"w x 5"h

This piece is a mechanical representation of the way people move through life, meeting others, drifting away, wanting to be close or wanting to be alone, etc. We can never truly know another, yet the attempt, the clumsy confidence with which we cling to...

A Series of Arbitrary but Passionate Decisions 2006

34"l x 9"d x 36"h

This machine is about the unforseeability of life; the way we make decisions based on a set of circumstances, which brings a new set of circumstances, and new decisions, and on and on. At some point we must admit that there is no way we can plan our lives...

A Complex but Inelegant System 2005

10'l x 4'w x 5'h

Built between July and December of 2005, this was my first large machine and the beginning of the body of work dealing with the human condition. It consists of an operator end, separated from the rest of the machine by a wall containing a video monitor, and a stage end ten feet away where a marionette moves around...

Geared Candleholder 1 2005

14"l x 5"d x 18"h

I built this in late 2005 for my friends Jodi and Daniel as a wedding gift. In a sense it is the first machine I completed though it does not fit into the body of work that the others belong to. These were my first gears: an awkward attempt to create involutes by hand...