darkness is your candle

In January of 2009, I began a new chapter of my life and moved into a beautiful victorian on Liberty Hill in San Francisco at the intersection of the Mission, Noe Valley, and the Castro. It began like all other big moves I’ve made, with an innately strong feeling about a city after visiting several times, and a girl to motivate me to make the transition. This was probably the 3rd time this story had played itself out in my life. This move was unique for a number of reasons… not the least of which was the fact that within 2 weeks of moving to SF, my girlfriend of 3 years and I decided to call it quits.

I had been working at a prestigious design firm as a senior designer in Seattle and transferred to the headquarters based here in SF. I enjoyed the rigorous intellectual exercises, vigorous discussions, and increasing focus on social networking, media, and entertainment. One weekend in early April I got a phone call that changed my life forever. I was up in Sonoma with a group of friends when I received a message that my mother had suffered from a heart attack and passed away. The timing was uncanny… my father had passed away a year earlier on the very same day. I knew almost immediately that I needed to take a step back from my career, and spend some time working through the loss.

"We Come In Peace!" by Adam Ebel

When my father passed on, I kept working… in fact I decided to take on more to keep my mind off of it and do my first major art installation, dedicate it to him, and launch (or “crash”) it at Burning Man 2008. I had built installations before, but never on this scale and I had little experience with creating large pieces with wood. I found the process of designing professionally during the day, and working on personal art all night to be therapeutic and fulfilling… and also exhausting. The piece was called “We Come In Peace!”… it was a giant UFO crashed into the desert at an 80-degree angle. I found the idea hugely compelling and descriptive of where so many things were at during that time period… within my own life, my family, our country, etc. It was a time of things ending and others beginning… of Evolution.

So within a few weeks of my mother passing on, I decided I needed to make a few things happen… (1) take a step back from my career and focus on art, music, and life … all things that fallen lower on my priority list in years past, (2) travel and experience the world, (3) continue to produce music and perform it, and (4) design a new art installation for Burning Man 2009. The latter came together when my good friend was visiting from out of town and suggested simply that we build a “robot” as I was driving him back to the airport. For some reason that idea really stuck with me and got my imagination going.

Robot Uprising Blueprints

I spent a few weeks after that sketching and thinking about size and weight, and deciding conceptually what this piece would be about and how it was going to be distinct. I am a big fan of art that uses negative space as a means of implying greater mass than actually exists. Out in the desert, the sand is pretty much all you’ve got… so why not use it? Also, while the UFO was meant to be somewhat tragic, I wanted this new installation to be triumphant – to be about awakening, awareness, and joy. About owning your life and your fate. I decided on a large robot waking up from beneath the desert, sitting up, and pushing itself up out of the ground with half of its body submerged below the sand and a giant grin on its face. On a more abstract note, this piece was inspired by the idea that people often become robots in their lives, their work, and with their families for whatever reasons… the things that we hold close to us when we’re young. Anyway, this robot symbolically “woke up”.

5x3 ft FTIR Touchscreen

I also wanted it to be something people could interact with in a meaningful way. I had gotten into building large touchscreens using IR lasers (LLP) and wanted to build one from scratch using a technique I hadn’t tried before called FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection). I ultimately decided to build a large 5×3 ft touchscreen and place it at the center of the experience, mounting it in the chest of the robot. During the day and for the first few evenings, we replaced the touchscreen with a 5×3 metal plate that had a heart painted on it that glowed in the dark.

Robot Head

An old college friend, who is also an artist helped me with the design of the robots head. Originally, I wanted to create something much more android-like and realistic, but she convinced me that simplifying it and making it more iconic was the way to go. She suggested a crazy wide smile and spotlights for eyes that people could control which really brought the whole idea home for me. Also, I wanted to turn the smile into a spectrum analyzer so that it would visually represent audio input … whether it was a persons “robot voice” being spoken through a mic (which I used a Korg Kaoss Pad to achieve), or music being simulcast from the “robo-dome” through the robots massive sound system. I hired another artist who was skilled in soldering and we ordered a kit off of eBay, he put it all together… then wired the mouth with 256 blue LED’s. Suffice it to say, the purple spotlights and the blue LED smile were beautiful at night.

Robot Uprising (daytime)

I had the robot (which was ~20 ft tall and weighed around 3 tons) delivered to Black Rock City by a professional trucker from Oakland on a giant flatbed truck. The truck ended up blowing two tires on the way out, and was a day late as a result. There were more than a few moments where I felt the possibility of all that hard work being for nothing… but I kept a positive attitude and it finally arrived the next evening to a great deal of excitement from me and my friends.

My friend, and DJ, was in charge of organizing all the music that was performed in our dome during the week. We had both live music, performed by Sebastian and his group EQLateral, and some phenomenal DJ’s. We didn’t consistently pack the dome by any means, but there were a few very memorable performances/parties in there.

Here are a few videos from Sebastian’s performances inside our dome:

Like many great things that happen in life, one of my favorite parts of the robot experience was a last minute decision. Sebastian and I were standing in Guitar Center a few days before burning man debating whether we should buy two 100-ft audio cables and simulcast our dome performances through the robot. I was leaning no (to save some time and money), and he was leaning yes… but in the end it turned out to be one of the best parts for the interactive portion of the installation. As our DJ sets were “simulcast” through the robot, people walked up to the touchscreen and did visual interpretations of the music. It was phenomenal to see so many smiles…