Fleeting Disguise

 
This data sculpture is a rendition in 3D pen of an early proposed structure for the spike protein of the coronavirus.  

Fleeting Disguise is a tracing by 3D pen of a proposed structure for the SARS-Cov-2 spike protein.

Though the coronavirus' spike is a trimer of three protein molecules (and actually has 3-fold rotational symmetry) the projection I traced lends it the bilateral symmetry of a mask, which might be appropriate since this structure is how the virus fools a human cell into letting it in.

Early in the pandemic this proposed structure for the spike protein was published in preprint.

The technique of tracing with a 3D pen (a miniature plastic extruder) is pretty challenging to control and leads to some wild alleatoric details which I kind of like.

Detail of Fleeting Disguise.

Fleeting Disguise is a wall-mounted sculpture; material: 3D printing plastic; dimensions: 14in x 15in h x 0.5in d. Fleeting Disguise was exhibited last summer at Washington Sculpture Group's show Sculpture Now 2020 at the McLean Project for the Arts.

They Urned It, a data sculpture in the shape of the Fed's covid-era balance sheet explosion

While you were dodging covid the Federal Reserve was printing money for the bond market like it was going out of style-- permanently inflating the cost of financial assets (like a house) beyond the reach of your stagnating income. I thought I'd make a sculpture out of that.

They Urned It: a data sculpture in the shape of all the money the Federal Reserve has printed for the international bond market.

 

In the nearly 12 years that the federal minimum wage has stagnated at $7.25 the Federal Reserve has found several occaisions to decisively inflate financial assets by making massive purchases in the bond market, particularly in the past year.

This was a chance to combine my interest in data sculpture and basket weaving. I rotated the Federal Reserve Bank's balance sheet (a measure of the cummulative financial assets the bank has purchased with newly created dollars) around its time-axis to loft an urn-like surface in Grasshopper. Then I plotted geodesic trajectories on the surface (paths on the surface that that straight weaving elements would naturally follow,) also in Grasshopper. The calculated angles of intersection, and distances between intersections were programmed by hand into the aluminum strips by punching notches on the sides.

Mating notches assure that the weaving elements cross at the intended distance  and at the intended angle.

 There are only 28 weaving elements in the basket-- that's not really enough to capture all the detail in the time series, but I'm pretty happy with the covid flare at the top. Material: aluminum flashing; dimensions 24in x 24in x 34in high.

Me weaving They Urned It.

3d printed gridshell

Gridshells offer a way to make smooth 3d surfaces from a flat 3d print by constraining distances along the perimeter. For example, the classic hemispherical kitchen sieve is made by constraining a flat, bias-cut, rounded square of wire mesh to conform to a circular perimeter. Flat gridshell meshes can be 3d-printed by tracing the grid twice, always lifting the pen over the crossings to minimize welding there. Flexing of the completed gridshell breaks any small welds at the crossing while maintaining the integrity of the extruded filaments. This example was hand printed with the 3Doodler Start 3d-pen.

Precarious

This 2019 mixed media sculpture reworks "Space According to Income," an earlier computer generated print of 126 million pixel-sized dots spaced according to the income of 126 million US households, by adding lacquer overpainting and a copper wire bent in three dimensions that abstracts data representing 9 years of non-seasonally-adjusted GDP growth during a slow--and precarious-- recovery from the Great Financial Crisis.

Humanity's First Gravity Wave

On 14 September, 2015, humanity made its first observation of a gravity wave-- a ripple in spacetime that had travelled billions of years before reaching earth, arriving just as humans gained the ability to detect it. I've commemorated this lucky and epoch making event with a small monument in dyed aluminum.

Theoretical analysis proved that this wave originated in the swirling coalescence of two black holes.

Exhibited at the Capitol Hill Art League in 2019. Aluminum, wall-mounted sculpture, 8" x 8" x 2" d.

Deficit Hawk Down

Deficit Hawk Down. 2018.

My sculpture, Deficit Hawk Down, in the Capitol Hill Art League show at CHAW this month looks at the the world through the eyes of the "deficit hawks" who came to Washington expecting to decrease the federal debt, and ended up adding to it.

The data is CBO projections for the Gross Federal Debt (increasing from $21.2T to $27.0T in the years 2018-2024) supplemented by the Joint Committee on Taxations estimate of the increased annual deficits due to Tax Reform (accumulating an additional $1.1T in debt through FY 2024—even with macro effects on growth included.) Size: 13 cm x 28 cm.

Life off the Hill

I just finished three works on the theme of "Life off the Hill" for a show at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. One of them is literally right off the hill: Paddle River (The Anacostia in DC).

Paddle River (The Anacostia in DC). Aluminum. 53"w x 25"h x 1"d.

The other two are more metaphorically "off the hill"—of privilege—being data-art relevant to all lives in this country: Boom Times (The four jobs booms since 1983) and I Survived Mt. Volcker (Fed rate '54-'09.)

Boom Times (The four jobs booms since 1983). Aluminum. 8"h x 10"w x 2" d.

I Survived Mt. Volcker (Fed Rate '54-'09). Aluminum. 11"h x 14"w x 4"d.