Scratching the Surface, 2025

this series of work comes from the process of taking apart broken 3d printers from my workplace. this has involved unscrewing hundreds of pieces, separating usable parts, and sorting the casing material. large individual components like screens, motors and hot ends are pretty easy to reclaim.nnsmall components like capacitors, resistors, and screws are also pretty easy to reclaim. it
takes time and care.

the boards pictured here were made and connected to operate additive manufacturing machines. although i was taking material away from the boards i wouldn’t describe the process of this work as subtractive. rather, the work positions degradation, decay, and destruction as primary fabrication methods. my longstanding desire to see machine parts exist beyond their capacity to produce capital is held in this fabrication process.

the process of stripping the circuit boards pictured here was labor intensive: after unscrewing them from protective layers they were underneath, i desoldered every component by hand. removing the silkscreen layer and solder mask took a lot of experimentation with paint strippers, dremels, pallet scrapers, the back of a spoon, and a lot of sandpaper.

circuit boards tell a story and i believe they should be treated as cultural texts. the circuit boards featured here come from an e3d “big box” 3d printer. the big box was launched on kickstarter in 2015 and became available for purchase around 2017. it was released as fully open source and it’s casing was made of lasercut plywood. based on the trace thickness and soldering methods on the pcbs, i assume they were manufactured at different times on very different equipment.

Handmade Synth Interfaces and Performance Workshop, 2024.

Media from the Handmade Synth Interfaces and Performance Workshop I led at Pig Iron Theatre Company as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in collaboration with Cannonball Arts. Participants made variable resistors from everyday materials and attached them to a simple synthesizer as an interface to play the instrument. It features a custom circuit board with my drawings and writing.

Homemade Speakers, 2024.

A series of speaker experiments I made from hand, using a vinyl cutter, soldering iron, and wrapping copper wire around a spool of thread.

Schematic Poems, 2020.

This is a selection of poems I wrote on schematic diagrams of electronic circuits. I see the schematic poems as interventions within the practice of diagramming, investigating the textual elements at play within electronics and their representations. I chose circuits I was working closely with at the time, many of which are common to ubiquitous IC’s. These poems were a part of my graduate thesis project.