MATERIAL
Animal w/ Ash FureSilbersalz, Halle (Salle), Germany. 2026
Yale Schwarzman Center, New Haven, CT. 2023
Animal: A Listening Gym, developed with composer and artist Ash Fure, approaches sound as something more than an auditory experience. Through a collection of interactive stations, visitors are invited to touch, lean, press, and otherwise negotiate with sound as a physical force. A gymnasium of sorts, only the equipment is a little stranger.
Each station operates according to its own peculiar set of mechanics. Vibrating surfaces, acoustic foam, and an assortment of everyday hardware are assembled into instruments that sit somewhere between sculpture, architecture, and exercise equipment. Some are delicate, others cumbersome. All require a certain amount of bodily participation.
Despite their differences, the stations share a common structural language. Built primarily from off-the-shelf materials, the framework operates as a kit of parts that can be assembled, taken apart, shipped, and rebuilt elsewhere. Across different installations, the system accommodates new configurations, material substitutions, and on-site improvisation.
Collaboration w/ Xavi L. Aguirre (stock-a-studio)
Video by Daisy Ziyan Zhang
Ground Control
Governors Island, New York, NY. 2025
The grid has long been a foundational tool in architecture, shaping how we see space and how we build. But its influence goes beyond geometry—it organizes circulation, consolidates land, and often turns space into property. Truly grasping the grid’s hold on architectural thought means reckoning with its legacy of appropriation and partition.
At the same time, architectural design has traditionally relied on static representations—plans, elevations, sections—to convey spatial relationships. Yet there’s untapped potential in exploring more dynamic, performative ways of understanding space. Choreography, like geometry, is a system of instructions unfolding through space and time. It shares geometry’s focus on proportion, sequence, and spatial coordination—just without fixed form.
By analyzing choreography, we can uncover the underlying structures that guide movement in architectural construction, offering new ways to think about the relationship between land, labor, and design. This project explores the shared harmonics of geometry and choreography by transposing the perfect square plan into both a rectangle and a circle. What emerges is a framework that links the grid to embodied knowledge of construction—bridging measurement and movement, inscription and instruction. A construction site ballet.
Video features a snippet of the 17-minute performance with dancers Rebecca Pappas, Alexx Shilling, and Ella WS
Video by Deborah Garcia
Die Schlange (the snake)
Cambridge, MA. 2025
Die Schlange (The Snake) takes its name from a drawing instrument described by Albrecht Dürer in his 1525 treatise Underweysung der Messung (Instruction in Measurement). Rebuilt as a contemporary apparatus, the project tests the relationship between forward and inverse kinematics, two methods of calculating movement that persist within the logic of our deterministic machines.
Standing nearly twelve feet tall, the apparatus is constructed from steel tubing, mechanical joints, and motors choreographed through a series of coded instructions that coordinate its movements in space. The resulting structure moves between the precision of a machine and the less predictable behavior of a mechanical dancer. A drawing instrument without the drawing.
Video by Daisy Ziyan Zhang