Bio
After ten years making electronic music, followed by ten years as a full time visual artist, I landed a dream gig at Meow Wolf as an Experience Designer.
Being an Experience Designer at Meow Wolf means that my role varies depending on the project. Most of the time I work with the Artists, Creative Directors, Producers, and other stakeholders in a project to help bring our collective creative intentions to life. This means brainstorming, visual development, and design work. Sometimes I work with Creative Engineers to design interfaces and storyboard sequences to help dial in our interactive experiences. Sometimes I make physical objects or images that get installed directly into our exhibitions. Most of the time I'm hanging out in rooms with cool/smart/creative people having philosophical conversations and attempting to make sense of it all with some drawings.
The Real Unreal
Experience Designer
Projects
Convergence Station
Narrative Props Fabricator
There are a lot of little moments that I got to touch in Convergence Station, but a particularly fun story involves the C Street newspaper machines. The design for those machines is based on project I made with my mom when I was 5. One day we built a TV out of a cardboard box and a long strip of paper rolled up on paper towel tubes. If you twist the tubes, you roll the drawings on the paper past the screen. The newspaper machines are basically the same thing but bigger and made of more durable materials. When I showed the newspaper machines to my mom, she revealed that she still had the TV we made! It took 30 years to get from the prototype to the final build! Thanks for the inspiration, mom. :)
Projects
I was able to work on a lot of bits and pieces at Omega Mart. The Osmositron and the science cabinet in the DART office were especially fun and involved large amounts of support from the Art and Fabrication teams. It was such a privilege to have access to their expertise. Having the opportunity to design the Zenion language and Source symbology was very satisfying and turned me on to the fun of in-depth world building. The pieces I am most proud of at Omega Mart are the Source periodic Table, Portal Tracking Report, and Symptoms of Portal Sickness posters in the DART office, all of which were co-created with writer Collin Stapleton and the Visual Development Team. Not only were they funny and fun to make, but they laid foundations of Source and Portal science that we continue to build upon today.
Projects
The Voice Activated Kaleidoscope you will find tucked into the corner of the Saloon is the first thing I built for Meow Wolf. I love it's simplicity and immediacy. The hidden Nimseskus at HOER is one of the most fun projects I've been a part of. Coming up with all the different places and methods of hiding them was a blast. My favorites are the tube in the arcade, the one getting shocked in Fancy Town, and the silhouette you can find in the flushing pipes room. You can find the Jean/Eng lenticular I made at the top of the stairs in the house. The precision it took to assemble the structure made it a fun challenge that I enjoyed. The image itself was created by the very talented Gabriella Leger-Lovato painting over a photograph taken by one of my favorite photographers, Kate Russell. I loved personally illustrating a book as strange and wonderful as Jeans Dream Journal, which was written by Kimberly Belflower.