In conjunction with my ongoing exhibition Inverted Dome at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Mackey Garage Top, I’m releasing a series of fully digital studies that further advance ideas touched on within the exhibition. The second in this series of four works is Azimuth Wave.

Digital Study #2 (Azimuth Wave), 2022

Azimuth is a type of angular measurement. It establishes an orientation in relation to a point of interest within a spherical coordinate system. The concept is typically used in navigation, mapping, astronomy, and other disciplines.

In everyday speech, a mirror is a surface that reflects back an inverted image of its surrounding environment. Mirrors in our homes are used for self-reflection, in our cars for navigation, and throughout cities as exterior cladding for skyscrapers. More broadly, a mirror is a wave reflector — optical mirrors reflect light waves, but other types of mirrors reflect audio or even atomic waves.

“What was the first piece of software you published?” I asked my dad as we chatted in my studio last week.

Around 1977, he wrote Texwriter, an early word processing software for personal computers that laid out and indexed pages. Texwriter ran on 8080 and Z80 computers with 64k RAM; the floppy disks could be purchased at Byte Shop in Mountain View or later via mail through Seymour Rubinstein’s nascent venture MicroPro International. In those days Mike Posehn worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and he offered Texwriter to the secretary of his group, who wanted nothing to do with it. Why would they, when they had a sophisticated typewriter capable of saving, modifying, and duplicating multiple pages at a click? And if a typewriter sounds anachronistic, well, the landscape at the Lab was truly exotic. The shadow of the Cold War still loomed, with funding flowing for the technological best-in-class — like an oscilloscope with a Polaroid camera fitted to take a picture of the screen. All data capture was analog, and these beasts had to be elaborately synced and whispered to if one wanted to get the slightest set of calculations off the ground. It was an analog world on the cusp of a new wave.

In conjunction with my ongoing exhibition Inverted Dome at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Mackey Garage Top, I’m releasing a series of fully digital studies that further advance ideas touched on within the exhibition. The first in this series of four works is Mirror Chain.

Digital Study #1 (Mirror Chain), 2022

Instead of the inverted U.S. Capitol Dome currently installed within the physical gallery, in this virtual world we find a length of mirrored chain that stretches from floor to ceiling. Mirror Chain references both the concept of a blockchain first advanced by Satoshi Nakamoto in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, and the proliferation of cryptocurrencies that have followed in its wake. One is also invited to consider the phenomena of supply chains, chains that bind, and chains that are worn in popular culture to signal wealth and status.

Each digital study in the series will be distributed via the MAK Center for Art and Architecture email list, social media, and website.