Magnetization, 2023; Bananas, electrical wire, transformer, custom circuitry

Magnetization turns a simple fruit into an improvised biological circuit. Electrical wire is wrapped around bananas, converting them into low-tech, high-feedback interfaces. When participants touch two different tips of the banana, a mild electrical shock passes through them, producing a jolt of alertness and a brief awareness of the body acting as a conductor.

The work merges haptics, sensory augmentation, and bio-engineering. Like a handmade, accidental GMO, each altered banana becomes a hybrid of organic matter and technological intention. Touch becomes an interface, a question, a way of collapsing the distance between biological sensation and artificial circuitry.

Our sense of self is already entangled with the systems we build. From pressing a button to grasping an electrified banana, every point of contact is a form of communication—not just information transfer, but a negotiation of meaning, sensation, and connection. Magnetization makes this visible: the charged intersection of body, machine, and desire.

As the piece develops over time, the bananas darken, collapse, and take on new forms after the wires are removed—an afterimage of the current that once passed through them. The material remembers the interaction long after the circuit is gone.

Communication here is not verbal exchange, but relational definition: each encounter establishes what the body is to the machine, and what the machine becomes in response. It is a shifting loop of recognition, agency, and touch.

The system extends beyond biological conductivity to sensory reflection, where motion, perception, and circuitry form another loop of feedback.

Reflects and Reflected, 2023; Mirror mini blinds, aluminum, electric motors, motion sensor, custom circuit board
60″ × 20″ × 20″

Video documentation of early version (2023)
Images above show updated structure (2024)

Reflects and Reflected transforms a set of motorized blinds into a responsive, living mirror. As a viewer enters the space, motion sensors trigger the mirrored slats to open and shift, breaking the reflection into moving fragments and reassembling it in real time. The piece turns seeing into participation: the viewer becomes both subject and image, both the one who looks and the one being reorganized by the machine. What emerges is an active interplay between body, space, and reflection.

The work extends a lineage that includes Robert Morris’s Four Mirrored Cubes and Daniel Rozin’s responsive mirrors, but pushes that conversation toward instability and perception-in-motion. Instead of offering a fixed reflection, it stages a negotiation. Awareness becomes something that flickers, recalibrates, and reforms as the mirror moves. The boundaries between viewer and environment loosen; the self is continually assembled and unsettled in the gap between reflection and reality.

Together, these works map the shifting boundaries between body, material, and machine, where perception becomes an active feedback system.