noah feehan / AKA

SWOON ROUTINE

2026-01-10T00:00:00-05:00

In this performance, three custom quadcopters climb to a certain height and then cut power to their own motors, freefalling until the last moment before they hit the ground; they restore power and re-stabilize, and then rise again to repeat this pattern indefinitely.

Loop

For the devices, they exist in a bistable state, flip-flopping between serene order and perilous chaos. For the observer, the piece places at its forefront the question of how keenly can we perceive these controls, how might we recognize (or even empathize) with a robotic system that evinces these moments of giddy/vertiginous abandon?
There’s a split-consciousness at work here that is different from most autonomous systems - most systems that encounter the unknown (new terrain, new waypoints, new forces and loading) have a highly-developed rubric for working out the next process, the next iteration of the OODA loop. Here, the loop is intentionally interrupted at a critical point, while a parallel process, an observation process, becomes paramount, intervening at the last moment before disaster.

Swoon

At the end of his essay on Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne, Baudrillard writes about the act of swooning:

Nothing is more beautiful, since swooning is at once the experience of overwhelming pleasure...

Please follow me.

…I began work on this piece interested not in imparting an essentially human condition onto a quadcopter, but instead curious as to how the hopelessly contingent, utterly alien X form of the drone could still engender in its audience some qualities that are fully and only human.

Commission

This piece was created as part of the Cornell Tech Backslash Fellowship of 2024-2025.
Special thanks to Mario Yang, Tobi Wienberg, and Prof. Wendy Ju.

WHAT WE ARE LIKE

2025-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

An aluminum superstructure contains a 1-meter cube of Nomex suspended by elastic cords. The cube is embedded with dozens of small pyrotechnics sequenced by fuse material that is embroidered along the inside surfaces of the fabric. Seven of the cube’s edges are zippers, allowing it to unfold to a planar form that can be mounted on a wall.
The pyrotechnics are triggered and the cube contains the resulting energetic burn. Afterwards, the wall-hanging displays the residue of the passionate, chaotic process.

Smoke

A three-level quote: in Bill Viola’s Reasons For Knocking At An Empty House he writes “Van Gogh, writing in his journal, quoted Saint Beuve: ‘One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, yet no one ever comes to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney and continue on their way.’”

Phases

The piece is intended to be restaged any number of times - the cube accumulates the residue of each action and will eventually be destroyed. An audience is not required for the pyrotechnical performance. The sculpture may be left in its ready-to-burn state for days or months. The video of a performance is timeshifted to prolong the action beyond reasonable limits.

Production

The Nomex cube was designed and made by Jill Haefele.

INTIMATE TELEMETRY

2025-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

First-person video from a barely-stable drone. The the realtime telemetry software has been altered to deliver an address to the viewer.

Tuning

The quadcopter’s flight control system has been de-tuned to render it less stable, on the knife-edge of controllability. Each maneuver introduces further instability, threatening the coherence of the flight and its payload.

Interference

FPV drones are some of the last platforms that privilege the immediacy of analog video over its more stable but laggy digital successor. Here the video signal is further degraded by routing its signal lines alongside the motor control wiring, introducing analog interference that is modulated by the intensity of motor output. The more effort the system exerts in order to stay aloft, the more the transmitted signal is degraded into noise.

Kara Walker - Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)

2024-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

I led the development of this large-scale animatronic sculpture system by Kara Walker. It opened in July 2024 as the inaugural commission for the Roberts Family Gallery at SF MoMA. The piece is free to the public and will run continuously through Summer 2026. The work features eight animatronic “Dolls” moving amid a bed of 35,000 pounds of obsidian.

The full title of the work is:

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker

Each Doll has a custom skeleton and motor system whose capabilities accommodate a vocabulary of pose and motion that Kara developed for each Doll. As an ensemble, Kara then choreographed 19 long-form motion sequences, some lasting over 25 minutes, to comprise the action in the show. Day-to-day, the piece will autonomously cycle through the 19 motion sequences, never repeating over the course of the exhibition.

For this project, I needed a mechatronics expert who specializes in long-running custom fabrications - lucky for me, Bill Washabaugh of Hypersonic Studio was available to design, fabricate, and test the Doll mechatronics. Gary Graham designed the coture garments worn by each Doll. Petra Schmidt of Kara Walker Studio produced the project.

It was a pleasure to work with such a dedicated and talented team, and to get the oportunity to work with a thoughtful and kind artist at the top of her game.

Press:

The New York Times

TRANSIT

2023-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

One display shows a wooded scene with a cube in the middle-foreground. After some time, the cube detonates. The video continues until the smoke has cleared and the scene returns to normal.
An adjacent display shows the exact same video backwards. The videos are cut such that the moment of detonation is the exact middle of each video. That is, at the exact center of the experience the cube transits from one screen to the other.

Time Crystal

In physics, a time crystal is a metastable arrangement of atoms in both space and time. A conventional crystal structure is defined by the regular arrangement of atoms in space, forming a lattice with a predictable and periodic structure. In a time crystal, the periodicity occurs in the time domain rather than the space domain; that is, a time crystal is distinguished by its periodic oscillation between spatial arrangements.

Primacord

“Detonation cord” consists of a textile sheath around a core of cast high-explosive, usually PETN or RDX. Once triggered, the detonation propagates at 6500m/s, allowing precise coordination between blast sites. The sculpture in this work is made of detonation cord: very few processes on the planet (short of a nuclear blast) transmute matter more instantaneously.

Production

This series was filmed at an explosives storage facility in Portland CT and was performed under the supervision of a licensed explosives consultant.

PARAGON

2023-01-23T00:00:00-05:00

The sculptures are machined to match the exact dimensions of an iPhone 4S. Each piece has a different swipe pattern gilded onto it, using UV-catalyzed human nose grease as the gilding size.

The pattern of 24kt gold on each device in the series corresponds to the accumulated smudges after that kind of mobile interaction. For example, “Witness” features a strong diagonal smudges corresponding to the frequent zoom-and-pan involved in that activity.

Midas / Residue

Each sculpture’s face has gilding whose shape corresponds to the finger-smudges accumulated on the surface of a phone while engaged in a specific mode of use. The modes, and subsequent version titles, are:
- Like and Subscribe (YouTube, Twitter)
- Doomscroll (Twitter and news apps)
- Witness (camera and photo reel)
In the Midas legend, the king wishes that all he touches might turn to gold; in practice, with this gift comes the inability to feed himself.

Touchstone / Attention

The material in this sculpture has most commonly been used throughout history as a touchstone, the surface against which a merchant would scratch a piece of gold in order to determine the gold’s purity. The word paragon owes its etymological roots to this practice.

The gilding highlights the commodification of attention informing the design of almost every interaction hosted on the deivce. The accumulated smudges on a phone screen, ephemeral desire-paths of hand and eye, here precipitate into actual gold, deposited on the surface of a contemporary touchstone.

Production

The sculptures were CNC machined from a chunk of Noir Belge over the course of six months in 2022; polishing took another two months, as working with stone in these proportions is extremely delicate and tenuous work. The stone-milling facility uses large 6-axis robot arms to hold the tooling, similar to the robots used in automated car production facilities.

I chose the iPhone 4S because it is the phone that feels best in my hand.

SUPER POSITION

2022-11-09T00:00:00-05:00

In each video, a camera hovers directly overhead as a person walks in a complete circle over the course of exactly one hour. The person starts at the top of the screen and moves as consistently as possible, so that his position on screen can be read as the minute hand of a clock.

Labyrinth

This video-performance series draws on the tradition of labyrinth-walking, a meditative practice entangling perceptions of time, space, and copresence. The path of a labyrinth is designed to bring the walker at intervals closer to the center and away again, near other meditators and away agin, each in his own hermetic orbit of thought. Here, the circular path invites the viewer to experience the piece ambiently, allowing it to exist in the room without requiring strict focus - you and I come in glancing contact with each other throughout the hour, following the dynamics of the attention in the room rather than a path on the ground.

I use ambient videos like this as a way to yield, in their viewing, the same layered depths that are involved in the pacing-out and filming of the piece.

Beating the Bounds

Beating the bounds is a perennial rite in which a community transits the circumference of a village, their performance reinforcing a collective consensus on the boundaries and borders of their domain.

Here I am beating-out the clock, dedicating 1:1 attention to remarking/marking out time itself. The bounds are temporal and explicitly not physical; you can’t see the face of the clock in the shot, it is only traced out as I walk it.

I try to walk an exact circle, despite that circle being visibly interrupted by other things; streams, paths, etc; as well as to have the performance interrupted by nonparticipant actors (deer, frolf teams, vehicles, birds, leaves, etc). “Super position” of the clock and the timekeeping metric (rigidly measured face; highly technical filming equipment and process) onto various wilds in a manner similar to my larking piece.

Overhead View

A profound sociotechnical moment allows me my bird’s eye view here, a perspective long imagined in historical artworks (Nazca lines, Cerna Abbas Giant) but only now found ready-at-hand. The camera in this piece is ordered to be dead still, but its small motions (to account for wind, magnetic inaccuracies, etc) highlight the work taking place to serve up such a serene view - like a duck’s placid top-half gliding through the water while its unseen feet flail wildly below the surface. Similarly an absent orchestra of finely-tuned control loops and hyperprecise satellite constellations work to provide an imperturbable, centered, eternal view-from-heaven.

Production

Each video’s subtitle is taken from the phenomenon that interrupted the piece - the one in the hero image (video here) is “Zorro,” the name of the dog you can see confusedly trying to play with me while I’m walking the circle. Other titles are “Thorn”, “Frolf”, and “Deer”.

Prior to each performance, I measure out the circle using some standard surveying equipment; I mark out a 74-foot diameter circle and at each of the 12 arcs (one for each hour’s position on the clock) I place a small flag not visible to the camera. Once the camera is running, I use a timer to ensure I walk each section of the circle in the same amount of time.

FIXTURE

2022-11-08T00:00:00-05:00

FIXTURE is a continuous mapping between my phone’s 3-axis orientation sensor and the red, green, and blue intensities of an LED light strip. The 60 LEDs correspond to the last 60 minutes’ worth of orientation samples.

Implementation

FIXTURE is a 1-meter linear array of 60 lights; each light corresponds to a data packet describing the physical orientation of my phone. The mapping from sensor value to color is as straightforward as possible, with X, Y, and Z orientation values linearly scaled to R, G, and B lighting intensities.

Continuity

Packets arrive once a minute; as one packet arrives, it populates the leftmost position in the LED array and the previous packets move one position to the right. The length of the strip in pixels is the number of minutes into the past the piece displays.

The server has no database or memory - it simply provides the last value it heard from the phone. No attempt is made to “fill in” information lost due to interrution or interfeerence.

The result is a series of colors representing periods of one posture or another: a line of ten identical blues when I set the phone down to charge; a patch of mottled pinks where it was jostling about in my bag as I head to work.

This is as taut and durable a line as I can string between the sensed object and the display.

Metonymy / surrogates

FIXTURE is an experiment about remote forms of presence. I made it to augment my thinking about the ways our phones/devices often serve as functional surrogates for our presence, and to look for ways to expand, modulate, or isolate various parts of that relationship. A preliminary mapping is a logical first step, which is what you see here; I am still experimenting with other forms and arrangements to push on this line of inquiry.

The primary signal is as described: simply, the sensor values sampled each minute. The secondary signals reside in the extrapolations made possible by the presentation of the data in this form, this fixture: A metronomic progression of orientations; a series of postures; a progression of states.

FIXTURE is an attempt to manifest the metonymy between smartphone and person - its output is a peripheral awareness of this taut line strung between two domains.

Muhannad Shono - Teaching Tree

2022-04-05T00:00:00-04:00

I worked with artist Muhannad Shono as Technical Lead on this massive-yet-subtle artwork. It is available to visit at the 2022 Venice Biennale through November 27, 2022.

The work is a 40-meter long undulating line that starts out as a single palm stalk and expands into the room, culminating in a tuft of over 500 fronds spanning 10m in diameter. As visitors encounter the work, they notice that the entire skin of the sculpture is moving, breathing from within via a 57-channel nearly silent pneumatic actuation system that stretches and flexes the blacked-out, gently rustling palm material. Over time, visitors see a range of motion behaviors ranging from a variety of meditative, evenly-paced deep breaths to more sudden peristaltic shivers that ricochet up and down the spine of the sculpture.

It was a pleasure to work with Shono to shape his vision into an implementable and successful experience for the Biennale visitors; I particularly appreciate the mix of conceptual rigor and true generosity with which he approached sometimes-arcane engineering discussions. This project came together across oceans, languages, and teams in only four months. I am indebted to Ben Panreck for his ingenuity and leadership in designing the pneumatics system; to the dedicated team at WeExhibit, who led the logistics and architectural aspects of the installation; and of course to Muhannad’s capable and talented studio team. The images in the gallery above are from the piece’s host, the Saudi Pavilion.

Press / Links:

Anicka Yi - In Love With The World

2021-10-12T00:00:00-04:00

I worked with artist Anicka Yi as Technical Lead on this sprawling, deeply technical artwork. It will be available to visit for free at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall through January 16th 2022.

The work involves a cloud of 3-meter tall autonomous dirigibles, each following a unique set of proclivities that mutate and develop over the course of the exhibition. A thermal camera network mounted in the Hall allows each dirigible to understand where humans/mammals are, without involving any facial recognition or surveillance concerns. I am particularly proud that the entire exhibition does not need the external internet at all (although in the interests of transparency, some of our systems are securely remotely inspectable by the team to assist in debugging if necessary).

This project afforded me the opportunity to work with some truly excellent people, including the folks at Sitara Systems (whose main developer, Nathan, wrote the behavior software controlling each dirigible); the supportive and dauntless staff of the Tate (in particular producer Petra Schmidt); the infinitely capable and professional folks at Kitmapper (who are now running the day-to-day operations of the exhibition); innovative and peerless folks at Airstage and Pozyx; scent scientist Dr. Pam Dalton of Monell; and of course Anicka and her truly amazing studio staff. I miss them already!

Press: