Main Portfolio – Page 2

1 Cal Plaza

An illuminated surface that extends back and folds down the wall… changing color in real-time along with the position of the sun in the sky. A suite of digital photo galleries that each feature the curated work of Instagram’s most stylish California talent. An ultra high resolution print sliced onto the glass fins of the curtain wall, a composite print of the view from the top of this skyscraper – one timescape image that starts at sunrise and finishes after dark.

I led the team from ESI Design that conceived and designed these interventions.

180 N LaSalle St

In the neoclassical lobby of a Chicago office building, ESI Design created a media experience that amplifies the architecture. Lively projections appear on the upper wall surround, inviting tenants and visitors into a new relationship with the space. The templates visualize sets of live data such as weather measurements, local Instagrams and current news trends, as well as pre-produced media such as birds in trees and local scenes of L trains and Wrigley Field.

ESI delivered an advanced system of 13 synchronized HD projectors (hidden in a new lighting soffit) to create the seamless and highly visible canvas, mapped precisely to the defining gestural edges of the upper walls. The projections command the attention and delight of those inside and out.

I led the design of all the real-time, software generated media content.

In Residence

‘In Residence’ was a temporary public art project commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial in the UK. An initial project of their ‘On The Street’ program, which is an ongoing project to revive the neighbourhood of Anfield by engaging local communities with the arts.

Working with local young people, I created a site-specific video installation that imagines them inside these locked and boarded up houses. We removed the metal sheets that have largely replaced windows in that area, and converted the houses into temporary sources of light, by installing synchronized video projectors inside 5 separate houses on the same block.

The music that accompanies this video is by the incredibly talented Amiina (used with permission).

‘In Residence’ won the Celeste Prize 2010 for Video.

177 Huntington Ave

A 100 feet wide light wall that responds dynamically to temperature and wind data, and is permanently integrated into the lobby of a landmark I M Pei building in Boston, for Beacon Capital Partners.

Custom LED fixtures, designed by the ESI Design team and hidden within brushed steel housing, shine backwards onto the lobby wall, illuminating the concrete surface of the building itself, and creating shifting, ambient patterns of light that play across the entire length of the space.

In the elevator bay, a highly customized LED array provides a more informational counterpoint to the ambient light wall. Eleven high-resolution, 22 feet tall by 6 inch wide LED strips extend from the floor up to the full height of the ceiling. Working together as one single dispersed display, these narrow bands of media show data visualizations and local information.

DC Commission on the Arts

The Washington DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities approached Obscura Digital to design and produce a custom, interactive experience to allow the public to browse and explore their portfolio of site-specific public art projects.

In my role as Creative Director for Obscura, I conceived and outlined the design for the project, and then led the team through the process of realizing it.

The Hidden Life of Bridges

“The first big success of this year’s Time-Based Art Festival… one of the most impressive truly public art projects I’ve seen in Portland… the projections were gorgeous, the words often eloquent, the sounds evocative… the project really engaged the people of Portland with some of its most important public assets” – Brett Campbell, The Willamette Week

A site specific public art installation commissioned by the City of Portland (Oregon), this project used the voices and faces of the bridge workers to tell the stories about the structures that connect the city that was once known as ‘Bridgetown’. Custom sensors were attached to the deck of the Hawthorn Bridge, to detect the vibrations caused by passing traffic, and this data was used to create a soundscape in real-time. Pre-recorded interviews with the workers were then mixed into this live, generative audio environment. Speakers were hung above the walkway so that an audience could listen to the sound while watching projections on the neighboring Morrison Bridge. The projections showed a sound wave that was responding in real-time to the audio heard on the Hawthorn Bridge, and as the audio peaked, the sound waves opened to reveal the faces of the speaker, as well as images of the hidden interiors of the bridges.

The Always Season

This digital print mural was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for the exterior wall of the Harvey Theatre. It borders with the public plaza outside 230 Fulton St, in Fort Green, Brooklyn.

The image was digitally composed from multiple photographs and printed onto a specialty material for exterior surfaces.

Wayne Wheeler’s Amendment Machine

I worked with Moey Inc to conceive and design a feature of the American Spirits exhibition at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. The goal was to create a ‘machine’ that would tell the story of how Wayne Wheeler’s strategic actions helped bring about the Prohibition era in the USA. The look and feel of the machine was inspired by funfair or boardwalk attractions of the time.

I concepted each part of the exhibit and created a detailed animation to outline the design, after which I reviewed and approved the production process.