I worked full time at Philip Beesley Studio for 4.5 years, and now I do occasional work as an electrical design contractor/consultant. My primary role while I was full time at the company was designing and building large interactive art sculptures.
Noosphere, Futurium, Berlin, 2019
Noosphere was installed as an art exhibit in Berlin’s new Futurium museum. The core of the sphere contains LEDs and vibrating fronds that use procedural generation to create a constantly changing background behaviour. The sculpture also contains infrared light sensors and sound sensors to dynamically adjust the behaviour when visitors move in front of the piece and get closer to the centre.
This was the first project where I managed the electrical and IT system planning, site coordination, and production+testing of our custom hardware and cable harnesses.
I then went to Berlin and built the sculpture in a 9 day, 120 hour sprint.
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I returned on several visits in subsequent years when our contract was extended. On these visits I performed maintenance, tested software upgrades, and demo’d some new technology that we had developed for future project proposals.
Meander, Tapestry Hall, Cambridge (ON), 2020
Meander is the largest installation I’ve built with PBSI. It fills the atrium of an event hall in Cambridge, and took 2 months of continuous on-site work (compared to the 9 day sprint for Noosphere). It contains a similar set of actuators, sensors, speakers, and embedded controllers to Noosphere, but on a much larger scale.
I had refined our documentation standards by this time, which streamlined our planning process and allowed me to put more time into testing and improving the manufacturability and reliability of our devices and assemblies.
Grove, Venice, 2021
In 2021 we completed our installation for the delayed 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale. In addition to a sculpture canopy, Grove consisted of an array of custom speakers and a short film projected on the floor.
Grove was the largest installation that our team had managed completely remotely (i.e. we coordinated a local installation team, rather than installing it ourselves). Because almost every piece of our sculptures is custom-made, our documentation had to be meticulously clear and detailed.
This project also landed in the middle of an extremely busy year, with many of our other clients anxious to complete projects as soon as COVID restrictions had lifted. Thankfully, by 2021 we had the strongest group of people I’ve ever worked with, and we managed to pull off an awesome installation (that sadly none of us got to see or hear in person).
Grove is was subsequently re-installed in the Hong Kong Design Institute in 2023, using the same installation documents.
Reef, Ar Frout Castle, Carantec, 2021
Reef came at the end of our packed 2021. Our client was a private collector who wanted to create an event space with the sculpture, consisting of a canopy with chains of liquid-filled glass that light up when you walk below the piece.
Poietic Veil, Delft, 2023
Poietic Veil was my last installation with PBSI, which was a nice book-end to my tenure there because I did a workshop at the same university (TU Delft) one week after I joined the company. This trip was also a week-long workshop where we taught students in the Interactive Environments program about our approach to interactive exhibits. At the end of the workshop, we put together a small sculpture that is part of a multi-year ongoing collaboration with TU Delft and Delft Science Centre.
This project was the first deployment of the hardware system and updated ”moth” actuators I designed, which both performed really well. The capacitive sensing in the mylar fronds was so satisfying - you could brush your hand through the sea of fronds and have the sculpture vibrate and light up in response. It was the most fun I’ve ever seen people have with our sculptures. Especially because the sensing mechanism wasn’t obvious, it just seemed like magic.
This was also our first deployment of our new, more distributed software topology. Instead of a top-down control system where a single computer simulated virtual effects and puppeted all the actuators, each controller determined its own response to synchronized generative behaviour effects. This was a huge step forwards for our long term research goals of creating massive decentralized systems where emergent behaviour can develop.
