I look for awkwardness and ugliness I
look for things that bang against one
another that that are not physically
possible
elegance is what I'm trying to trying to
get you see a hole that gets wider and
wider and wider until it disappears and
then it forms that hole again it's not
unlike a jellyfish space creature
I'd been in New York for eight years
eight and a half years and I tried to
make it as a painter and I just didn't
enjoy it
anymore at the time I was a
superintendent for a warehouse in
Manhattan surrounded by so much steel I
thought well I should use this to make
sculpture I just was bored with
everything being static in my visual
world I wanted to see stuff move
I usually will develop a design on the
computer because it allows me to animate
it and actually see it moving in a semi
3d space the computers are absolutely
necessary for a lot of my designs
because there's so many parts when I
started designed I'll start with an
individual element that then gets
multiplied many times to build the whole
I take this spline now into a different
program called Rhino and I can export
this as a DXF file that my cutting
program can read
when I'm making things by hand my
intuition and my subconscious it will
plays a lot more into the final product
than it does if I'm just designing on
the computer because your body and
you're working in 3d space and you get
all kinds of things coming into your
head what looks good what doesn't look
good where to take it next I used to
make things with a lot of curvature and
I thought that they needed that shape to
spend well in the wind it turns out that
sometimes just a little bit of curvature
is better because it doesn't spend
terribly fast and really strongly
anything will work in a 50 knot win you
know just put a piece of metal out on a
table and it'll blow it away that's
kinetic but to make it spending about
one knot that's that's harder
in the back of the mirrors there's a
connection a link that connects to all
the mirrors in one place and it moves
only about an inch in a tiny rotational
circle every turn of the cups behind it
makes those mirrors rotate from the
ground to the sky so if you're standing
in front of it you get a view of
yourself for just a fraction of a second
when I was making and my father had a
stroke what gifts that I have to make
these things came from somewhere and
that would be my dad so I named it after
him usually at the end at the conclusion
of making something you'll you will get
another idea where to go next what to
make works sometimes it's not always
magic sometimes it's it's awful and if
even if you know it's not going to work
sometimes you still have to push it
through into the real world to find out
in the real world outs how to fix it
what matters is putting human feeling
into your design
you