Started with attending Burning Man starting about 12 years ago. Got jealous of my friends who were doing “real” engineering on these kinds of projects, and started volunteering, applying for and winning art grants, meeting other artists, and climbing the skill ladder.

If you attended Burning Man in 2019, Climate Week in SF in 2023, or Verge in San Jose in 2024, you may have seen my project Awful’s Gas & Snack. I also worked on the Love Blocks and the Jacks at the Conservatory of Flowers in SF (among many other projects).

I now run a small art fabrication business that just barely makes my studio rent most of the time, and is currently supplementing unemployment to pay my bills. It’s really, really hard to turn this kind of work into a livelihood, but it’s happening by necessity because I have no other work right now.

It’s also given me legitimate hardware experience — I’ve written code from scratch in Arduino and written modifications and extensions to WLED, and built custom controllers, remote sensor devices, and power systems (solar and batteries, relevant to the clean energy field). But I don’t quite know how to present this work as “legitimate”, even the stuff I’ve done as a full-fledged professional (like the work I did at Urban Putt San Jose, which you should definitely go see, it’s fun!)