INDUSTRY ICONS
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I had stumbled across an absolutely fabulous formula, which was to provide light art with a narrative”
Built specifically for theme Animalia, Mariposa was a great success
say, “Oh yeah, that’s nice, what’s next?” Then they walk off. Firmament was incredibly impactful at Burning Man. It got all kinds of cute nicknames: the hippie trap, the tripper trap, the acid blanket. My favourite was simply ‘Permanent’, as in, “We can’t get our friends to go.” That really struck me. It was also a pivotal time in my life because that winter I got an email from an event company in San Francisco that said something like, “How would you feel about bringing Firmament to this corporate event in Hawaii?” So I said, “Sure, if you’re paying.” That was the beginning of my professional art career. I had no expectation or intention when I did Firmament that it would end up being my career-launcher. I thought it was just another way to lose between five and ten thousand dollars, which is what I’d been doing with all my pieces. What are your favourite projects you’ve worked on? Were any specific pieces particularly ambitious? I did Firmament for two more years at Burning Man, and then I decided to create Paraluna , which is a spinning disc.
Complex works like Paraluna require lots of technical and artistic expertise
It’s a similar concept; you are in an environment with LED patterns moving along to classical music, except instead of a static thing that’s 52ft across, it’s a spinning disc 28ft across. That was even more successful than Firmament . After the pandemic, I brought Firmament and Paraluna back one more time, then in 2023 the theme was Animalia. I normally don’t care at all
about the theme, but I was like, “OK, I could do a butterfly. Sure. Why not?” It was quite technically challenging because it was all pretty heavy and I had to make my own custom tower. A friend of mine gave me the idea of having a
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