I remember a show that needed limited entry, some distance, a bit of quiet to take it in properly. It got none of that. Within thirty minutes people had climbed over everything like it was a playground, one piece gave way, and the gallery had to close for repairs mid-opening. That’s roughly when I stopped thinking of interaction as something I could design, and started thinking of it as something I could only provoke, then watch.

Waves is the clearest version of that. A rope spinning fast enough to trace a shape in the air, no buttons, no interface. People don’t activate it, they disturb it with their presence, the way a body disturbs still water just by entering it, shifting from calm into turbulence.

Outcomes spreads the same idea across a whole room. Vertical tubes reading presence like a field of theremins would, each one alerting its neighbors, creating a shared symphony, so a single person walking through never triggers quite the same sequence twice. Nobody composes it. Nobody conducts it. It negotiates the space with you.

Whatever Happened, Happened still tracks a room, presence, movement, who came close and when. But it was a shift away from real time performance, and started to care more about what got left behind because of what happened live. A laser, engraving concentric rings into wood for the length of a show, never resetting, an unalterable record. That shift, from reacting to recording, is what opened the door for the data visualization projects that followed.

There was a stretch of years, before video tracking and augmented reality made interaction mostly a software problem, when physical presence alone could throw a whole room off balance. I still think that was the good part. It’s where I feel at home, and something I’m working to explore in a different context.