Artist's Statement : Project 3 — BeaMoca 2 Electric Bugaloo

This project was one of the most genuinely enjoyable things I've made in a long time, which surprised me a little because it also gave me a tremendous amount of trouble.

The base started as a collage — which is something I've always loved doing. I just grabbed what I had around. Glue, paint, stickers, real rocks and sticks from outside in Colorado, and I'm pretty sure there's some dried ramen somewhere buried under the mountains in there. I built up the landscape piece by piece and let it become what it wanted to be. There's something I really like about that process — starting with physical stuff, real junk, and slowly making it mean something.

From there I introduced hex bugs to create motion — little creatures running around the terrain that viewers could actually interact with. I used projection mapping to bring the landscape itself to life, generating weather patterns across my handmade mountains and layering a buffalo herd migration pattern across the surface to create a sense of a world that was moving and breathing underneath everything. Lights illuminated the water and the terrain. The whole idea was a self-contained ecosystem — completely artificial in its materials, but alive in its own logic.

I ran into real technical problems with the circuitry and ran out of time before I could fully realize what I was seeing in my head. That gap between your vision and what you're actually able to produce is a specific kind of frustrating.

I'm planning to keep building this over the summer just because I want to. No deadline, no grade. My own little robotic world. I think there's a lot more it can become...