The Still, Small Voice Experiment

This element echoes an occasional Quaker practice. But Still Small Voice meetings are not Quaker meetings. They are not under the care or oversight of any governing body associated with the Religious Society of Friends, nor any other religious entity. Still Small Voice meetings take place in a kind of cognitive, cultural Third Space, between religion and art. There are no creeds, no truth-claims about the what is real or good that participants are expected to know or recite, no prescribed ways to talk or think about what it means to be human. There are only questions, different with each meeting, that participants are invited to reflect upon, and to speak about if they feel moved to do so. Participants are welcome to view the experience as a kind of participatory, collaborative art event. But it is also an inevitably communal event that takes place in a former house of worship, and we will all bring different associations with that context. It is in the variety of these perspectives that interesting things happen.

Housed in the lively interior of The Church, which is a former Methodist church converted into an arts center, meetings take place roughly twice a month, on Sunday at 10AM.

For more and updated information, go here, or check The Church’s website.

Podcast Interview

You can hear in the opener what a strange fit this interview is. “Building a Furniture Brand”—HA! I’ve practically done everything possible to unbrand myself! There’s no identifiable style in my speculative work, no discernible coherence to this website, no common thread tying my life together. I make things. I make them as well as I can and as beautiful as I can. Despite this odd fit, this conversation between Ethan Abramson and me made for a wide ranging and, I think, engaging chat. Check episode 123 of his podcast “Building a Furniture Brand” on whatever pod catcher you use. Here is a link to Spotify

Recent Kitchens

Two very different recent kitchens showing two very different material sensibilities. A large, almost chilly, modern kitchen, using opaque finishes and rift-sawn white oak, stained to a cool pale, and a much smaller, very warm kitchen fabricated from “rustic” or “character” white oak. Modern design by Nick Martin Architects, rustic oak kitchen by Kenton van Boer Architect. What’s your preference?

First Robotics 2023

I haven’t wept in probably a decade. I mean, I cry all the time for trashy TV shows and Tide commercials, but for real things? For the tragedies occurring all around us? My stingy eyes will rarely shed a single tear.

But when it came time to tell our two pit techs Sergio Lazaro and Oscar Leon, to stop their frenetic labor on the chassis of our bot, to stop trying to repair it in time for the next heat, because we finally knew that we were out of the finals… I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t tell them it was over. “Call it” the nurse tells the doctor in the trashy TV show. Call the time of death of the patient on the table. It was time to turn the robot off, to snuff out its cheery orange signal light, to end these kids’ wild ride through a strange and intense, and really really specific branch of human experience, the Robotics Competition.

When I finally mustered up and told them it was over… I could have sobbed if I’d have let myself go just a little bit more. I could have heaved and howled. But there had been enough drama on this trip. And you had to be on your toes on that arena floor. A lot of animated aluminum and steel and electricity and pneumatics beetling about. And we had work left to do. And the safety glasses just don’t hold so well when your face is all wet.

Team Supreme members included Nova Cherry-Brown, Bebe Huberty, Hugo Kapon, Sergio Lazaro, Oscar Leon, Luna Paucar, Eustorgio Rojas Jr., and Neo Simmons. The team spent just over two months building their robot from the ground-up, under the supervision of Bridgehampton School teacher and Team Administrator Jen Suarez, and Lead Coaches Alexander Huberty and me, who also accompanied the team to Hofstra. Mark McCloud also served as mentor.

This is Team 8595, Team "This Is How We Play", one of several out of Taiwan. They saved our bacon a couple of days into the competition. We had an early heat, one of maybe a dozen scheduled for the day, and our tire had blown its tread leaving us unable to accomplish many of the tasks in the game. With three minutes until we were to report to the queue for the next round, we recognized that we weren't going to be able to make it. We were going to be eliminated for forfeiting. This was one of several moments that felt, in the moment, like the lowest of moments. But without a moments hesitation or a word of language in common, these students, these rivals in other heats, elbowed in among us and nimbly set to the work of deftly riveting our tread back onto the aluminum wheel. In the din of the stadium, the two teams wordlessly worked together, handing the right tool or fastener at exactly the right time, shining the light in exactly the right spot, communicating with perfect fluency, but no language. It was a sublime moment of ecstatic mechanical communion. With seconds to spare, they got us into the queue and we won the heat. Slava Formosa. #frc8595

Life on the Edge

How did live edges become clichés? A design feature first popularized in the US by George Nakashima, beginning in the 1950’s, there is a quality that is both timeless and inherently novel about the detail. It expresses the primal character of organic growth, and no two edges are the same. It invites wildness into the order of human utility.

Clichés aren’t necessarily false, so much as they’re just things we’ve gotten lazy about in the way we think about them. At some point the market became satisfied. The eyes became jaundiced, and the novelty got lost in the repetition, the timelessness succumbed to datedness.

I have been experimenting with ways to breathe new life into this design feature. I take geometric patterns, generated by various means, and apply them to the surface bounded by the live edge. Mathematics embedded in the organic. Order bound by chaos.

If you follow my work on conspiracy theories, you may recognize some influence here. The patterns were derived straight from my work in that field. Form is philosophy; things are ideas.

Writing Desk Designs

3-D renderings aren’t only for the client. Computer renderings allow unparalleled accuracy when it come to showing a client important properties like scale and proportion. But they are great for makers too, allowing us to rehearse methods and sequences, to troubleshoot problems and explore variations.

Interview: On the Consequences of Hate Speech

This interview with Shelley Werner about the Vector Arts Intiative’s exhibition “On the Consequences of Hate Speech” was fun to do. No, I’m not the most charismatic interviewee. But on the plus side, I smelled really nice that day.

CrazyMaking Folio

A folio of images inspired by the contributions of the CrazyMaking community has started to take shape. In each image, a participant’s “craziest” or riskiest belief, shared during the course of the project, is laid over graphic patterns of various design and origin. Pattern-making and pattern-seeking are core ideas for the project—they are among the faculties that make us human. At the same time, beliefs (and belief systems) are essentially pattern-making/pattern-seeking expressions. Participants generously shared a wide variety of beliefs, ranging from inspiring to frightening, sublime to absurd. If you’d like to see more, poke your head down this rabbit hole.

Originating in the studio of Erling Hope, the Q.Public Conspiracy Theory is an experiment in treating the conspiracy theory as a work of creative expression, as a genre of art. It is an outgrowth of CrazyMaking Project dating back to 2014. Participants in that series of events will be able to see the results of their collaborative efforts by entering this rabbit hole.

You can register for free for this singular event here at Eventbrite. The Vision Lab website will not be fully live until 5pm EST on March 21.

Kitchen

Found: Kitchen executed for LevenBetts Architects and Reinhardt and O’Brien Builders featured in Dezeen, Architect Magazine and ArchDaily. Nilay Oza designer.

Solid rift-sawn white oak faces. Ildefonso Nieto and Levy Mwanza helped a ton.

VISION LAB

Sunday Jan 3 at 5pm, Vision Lab at Harvard Divinity School is presenting another gloriously strange project from our CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS PHOENIX FESTIVAL. What are the most dangerous things people believe? What are the most dangerous things that you believe? And how do we come to believe anything in the Post-Truth world? VISION LABBER Erling Hope has been using the conspiracy theory as a new form of art media and he presents his findings to us on Sunday. Should be a fascinating conversation. Dharam Singh, gong yogi extraordinaire, will be song selector for the event. Here's a bit more:

ERLING HOPE:

"It is the most consequential form of creative expression, changing lives, shaping culture and altering history on a scale far beyond the reach of any other art form. It provides the nurseries for religions, and the genesis for genocides. It is these things because it is the most ambitious of art forms: While the sculpture emerges from a hunk of stuff, music from manipulated sound, the poem from language that’s been hacked, this furtive genre frequently takes all of reality and makes something new from it. The conspiracy theory, in its mature form, sits at the pinnacle of emerging and recognized art forms.

“Most of us know about QAnon by now. Few of us know about its fictional progenitor Q.Public or “QPUF”. The Q.Public Conspiracy Theory is the first collaborative, prosocial, gamified meta-conspiracy theory to emerge from contemporary culture… that actually happens to be true, even if it isn’t real. Q.Public is a fictional conspiracy theory engaging the “craziest and riskiest” beliefs of its participants, framing current and recent events in a novel narrative structure, while also expressing humane values and a liberational ethos.

“As the US simultaneously doubles down on, and takes a step back from, its experimental pandemic of mass psychosis, the time is ripe for a close look at the aesthetic dimensions of belief, at the places where imagination and reality collide and diverge, and at how and why we engage in the creative act of believing things in the Post Truth world. Emerging from several years of collaborative effort (and several months of COVID lockdown insomnia), Q.Public, and the CrazyMaking project from which it emerges, is a deep dive into the dynamics of this newest, oldest genre.

My name is Erling Hope, and I am a Q.Publican. Take a tour with me down this innocent rabbit hole."

Email me for a link to the Zoom meeting.

Wreathed Handrails

Traditional wreathed handrails, as opposed to plug-and-play goosenecks and mitered components, are among the trickiest things to fabricate from wood. This set was developed and executed for Martin Architects using a combination of traditional and computer-aided techniques. They were to be installed by Martin’s building firm, on steel balusters. The balusters were being installed as I was designing and fabricating the wooden railing components, including the curved transition pieces.

This meant that the curved components had to be fashioned in a way that would allow them to meet the straight runs at pre-determined fixed points in 3-dimensional space. Uf da! This argued against bent-laminations, since the inevitable spring-back would be impossible to predict precisely. Instead, blocks were coopered and carved to form fair, consistent curves, terminating at precise endpoints.

Jewish Art Salon

I was honored to be showing at December 2018's exhibition sponsored by the Jewish Art Salon, titled ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF HATE SPEECH. It was on view from December 5 to January 18, 2019 at the Manny Cantor Center, NYC. Writer and critic Joan Baum wrote a review of this and other work of mine in the Jan 22 edition of The Independent. “Hope’s abstracts are beautiful tonal compositions, suffusions of red, coral, pink, purple, white, orange, yellow; circles that shade, in spots, into contrasting darker pigment. Patterns of identical six-bead circular designs interlock like a chain or necklace, but on closer inspection, the blurry word “kafir” emerges and recedes, depending on viewing distance and light.” Thanks Joan. Further details are available here. Commentary below.

“(Kafir I)” and “(Kafir II)” are parts of a series of works exploring the dynamics of language in belief systems. The word “Kafir” is the Arabic word for “unbeliever,” often translated as “infidel”, (from the root K-F-R "to cover”). Islamic traders used this epithet to denote the Sub-Saharan (non-Muslim) Africans they engaged and exchanged with. It was later picked up by white Afrikaners and became the South African N-word. It is a word of scorn, a word of hate, but also a word about belief.

I am a tourist here. A tourist trapped in a local’s body, engaging languages and experiences I do not know, as well as some that I do. I ask for forgiveness rather than permission. I am, after all, the goyest cracker on the platter, or so it would seem. But the contradictions and intersections of heritage, of race, the gravity and violence and folly of identity, spare no one.

But it is as a person of faith—as a skeptical person of faith—that I have been torn and fascinated by the ways that belief undermines faith for individuals, and the ways belief has become a central destructive force of our time. Belief in tribal / racial supremacy, belief in religious exclusivism, un-belief in science and climate change, belief in conspiracy theories, belief in (more or less) charismatic leaders who promise the world, just rendered upside down. Conspiracy theories in particular preoccupy me. They have become a fixation, though not in the usual ways. Belief is inherently a creative act. And it’s quite possible that in todays Conspiracy Industrial Carnival we’re seeing the birth pangs of a new religion, the world’s first digitally mediated one. It is chaotic and protean still, but it is starting to serve some of the basic functions of traditional religions, of identity and community building, of sorting the universe out, of explaining the world. And, strikingly, forms of fundamentalism have emerged already. Resistance to any lines of questioning which undermine the accepted narrative, hostility to any who offer these questions, dehumanizing those who disagree (we are sheeple led by shape-shifting alien reptiods), utter lack of humor, and, most insidiously, about fundamentalism of any sort, is the systematic suffocation of curiosity that fundamentalism expresses. 

I indulge a wide variety of ways for people to engage the world, mediated through belief or not. But the destructive nature of most of these conspiracy beliefs, amplified today by turbocharged media, with their endgame of despair; there is nothing good in them. The traction they have in the neo-fascist movements in the West is only matched by their tenacity in the Islamic world.

But there is also a sense that these properties are inherent to humanity, that they are part of a larger pattern of life in a competitive evolutionary context. Humans are built to other others, to see patterns where none exist, and to willingly blind ourselves to the uncomfortable and inconvenient. We are at a moment when the question of how and whether we can transcend these instincts is a living and urgent one. Is it a question of suppressing or burying this impulse (K-F-R: “to cover”)? Of rising above our human nature? Or is it a matter of finding ways to engage, acknowledge, and redeem these faculties, of blessing our human / animal nature? Of reclaiming every epithet, rendering them upside down and transparent and somehow still salient. We are all Kafir. 12/3/18

HGA Interior Design Awards Finalist

"Angels with Dirty Faces" Credenza is a finalist in the HGA IDA Awards.

You can vote for it here.

Fabricated from proprietary Purkinje Wood ("PER-kin-jee") w/ "Moster" pattern, walnut, rough-sawn silvered ash veneer, custom brass pulls. 40"h x 18"d x 9'-10"w.

Religion Is Alive and Well in Contemporary Art

Huffington Post 8/18/14

“On a breezy summer day, I joined a group of artists and writers in the basement of the Liberty Bar in midtown Manhattan to discuss the many places religious life meets the visual arts.” S. Brent Plate explores the relationship between art and religion, and attends a meeting I gathered in August, to discuss the same.

“Artists are toying with and tweaking rituals until they become relevant again to a new age. Ancient sacred texts provide a warehouse of endlessly adaptable narratives, while in their bookish, printed forms they become physical objects that are parsed and pared into new shapes and designs. Symbols are utilized for compositional structures, mined for their meaningful connections, and invoke the viewer toward a contemplative repose. And in their creation and implementation, communities of people join together to collectively experience these aesthetically moving sights, sounds, smells, gestures, and bodies touching bodies. The religious and the aesthetic have never been far apart.”

AIA Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture Awards

The AIA recognized the 2013 Sukkah project executed with Nilay Oza, Rabbi Leon Morris, and many friends at Temple Adas Israel in Long Island, NY.

Old News

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