The paradox of Chinook Arc was that it had to appear delicate and ethereal but also has had to endure repeat encounters, extreme weather conditions, and vandalism. I had a chance to visit seven years after it was installed and am happy to report that it has held up extremely well and become a community favorite. In 2014, my company Creative Machines any my collaborator for this piece Blessing Hancock designed, built, and installed Chinook Arc, an interactive, illuminated scul

I recently had a chance to create art for a rooftop garden in an urban setting. It was a dense site and required thinking carefully about placement, sight lines and the creative ways people could interact with the piece. I wanted the sculpture to be appealing and engaging from multiple perspectives and to 'work' for all varieties of audiences - people who are very physically active as well as those who experience the piece visually. Here are some early renderings and eventual

PART V OF THE FIFTH SPACE SERIES — Among the earliest human sculptures are those depicting Pleistocene megafauna – mammoths, mastodons and others. In certain human contexts throughout Eurasia and the Americas these megafauna represented the world’s most significant concentrations of wealth at the time – food, shelter, material for tools, materials for trade, and the sources of myth. Hunting megafauna required group activity, pushed our ancestors to their limits, and fired th

PART lll OF THE FIFTH SPACE SERIES — Each fifth space experience is built around a few key ‘moments’ in which the experience of the artwork is heightened. When we spend time with others in a place we love, in nature, or with a great work of art there is meaning created all the time. But meaning is especially created in crucial moments of great clarity that open something up within the person experiencing the art. These ‘moments’ are where I focus with my art. In the case of t

PART II OF THE FIFTH SPACE SERIES — I am currently developing a solar and stellar observatory sculpture: a tiny model of the universe influenced by historic observatories such as Jantar Mantar, Uraniborg, and Stonehenge. Like each of these, this sculpture is an observatory that you walk into to help you feel your connection to the visible universe. Imagine you’ve spent some hours or even days hiking to reach this sculpture. You’ve had time to decompress, walking has worked wo

The most fundamental rule for interactive art is to respect people's agency. There should be a clear and repeatable connection between what people do and how an artpiece reacts. That's how they can make the artpiece an extension of themself and begin to play with it. Only Connect, recently installed in a children's library in Fort Worth, has a series of secret buttons hidden among the book stacks. Each button triggers an animation inspired by the subjects of the books around

Leonardo da Vinci was the first to name the cerebellum – the curious portion of the brain that accounts for 10 percent of its mass but...