My background is in industry and science, a part of my life from a very young age. I grew up in a cold-hearted rural suburb, my father a self-taught electronic technician in the Route 128 high-tech beltway around Boston Massachusetts (the birthplace of early computer, radar and cold-war technologies), a radio amateur and technologist of great talent. I spent my childhood making things and taking things apart (mainly the latter); when I was twelve years old I (quite naively) made a functional copy of Edward Keinholz's Friendly Grey Computer – Star Gauge Model 54, in my own mode, after seeing it in long-defunct Science and Technology magazine.
Currently I make functional and complex instrumentation that reveals the beauty hidden within scientific apparatus of the 1930's through 1950's, a time of unsurpassed social and scientific change. My work is about the aesthetics of scientific problem-solving and the obscure traditions of technical design. With my specific knowledge of the era and period materials and obsolete electronic components (backed up by modern embedded computer technology) I create physical embodiments of historic conversations on long-standing problems, and illuminate discarded modes of thought and beauty. My instruments are presented as “products” of “World Power Systems”, an ironic and non-existent entity of obscure origins and intent.
By design it's often impossible to distinguish my instruments from historic objects; I use actual materials, components and techniques from this period. Each instrument performs some historic function, genuine or revisionist; they invite human interaction but also work as “sculpture”, subtly or passively, usually silently, working by themselves. They are not simulations or “virtual” anything, but actual devices designed for longevity and reliability. My goal is to create a complexity of layers: rich and beautiful materials; forgotten paradigms of beauty and endurance and meaning; cold and functional components, hard-edged in their own time but oddly organic now; beautiful to look at but with deeply functional internal complexity.
I started my working career while in high school, at jobs as close to science as I could get, initially as an electronic technician, later as an undegreed engineer in electronics, digital and analog design, later still in computers and networking, providing a solid technical basis for my present work. My interest in the history of computing and symbolic machinery dates to the late 1970's, and my understanding of technologies a half-century old has helped me even with modern problems.
Born in Boston Massachusetts in 1955, I moved to San Francisco in 1983, to Los Angeles in 1996, to Tucson Arizona in 1998, then back to Los Angeles in 2001 where I now live with my partner of 10 years, Josh Stehlik, on a converted commercial “compound” in the Silverlake area with two hairless dogs.