AiR
Hatfield Artist in Residence
"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float." - Alan Watts
From September 2025 to August 2026, I have the honor of being the Hatfield Marine Science Center’s Artist in Resident! Growing up on BOTH the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts in Panama, and then the Gulf waters of Florida, water is not just a subject for me; it has been a collaborator and teacher that’s shaped how I live and create. I wanted to make experiences that connect people to the coastal environment through sound. Exploration, imagination, and curiosity are pathways I use to build these connections. Much of my practice draws inspiration from enchanted objects, things that feel just a step sideways from reality. Close enough to be familiar, but strange enough to invite wonder through play.
Upcoming Shows:
Shellephone: NOW - ongoing, Hatfield Visitor Center
Sonic Tidepools, Stride Meets Tide: NOW - June 1, 2026, 9AM - 4:30PM, Gladys Valley Marine Science Building 2nd floor
Newport Bloom Festival: May 16, Newport Performing Arts Center
Hydrophonics Final AiR Concert: July 23, 2026. 3:00 - 5:00 PM, Gladys Valley Marine Science Building Auditorium
Shellephone
The Shellephone is an interactive sound installation permanently installed in the Hatfield Visitor Center that invites you to step into the ocean’s acoustic world using your own voice. Pick up a conch shell, speak into it, and hear yourself transformed into the calls of whales, seals, and other marine animals. It’s like a Snapchat filter, for your voice. Designed around playful, hands-on interaction, the experience uses familiar gestures (holding, listening, speaking) to turn visitors into active participants rather than passive observers. With connected shells, you can even hold conversations with friends and family in the voices of ocean life, creating shared moments of curiosity and laughter. After a moment of open exploration, a 90’s style website popup add disrupts communication with noise pollution (boats, sonar, airguns). Clicking the add makes the noise go away for us, but ocean life has to live with these disruptions. The piece is about learning through play, communication, connection, and the difficulties of an ever-increasing noisy world.
Sonic Tidepools | Stride Meets Tide
This project is a way of navigating through Newport, Oregon coastal region by sound. I ran through four regions: the estuary trail, the marina and south jetty, the bridge and historic downtown, and Yaquina Head. A flashing metronome kept my pace steady at 156 beats per minute. The run became a kind of musical performance: me as percussionist, and the landscape as the instrument. With a microphone at my feet, wood, metal, sand, stone, and water each answer differently, revealing the distinct character of each place through rhythm and resonance. Microphones in my ears capture the ambience of each moment, you hear what I hear. The result is an invitation to join my embodied experience and discover how sound can build a sense of self, environment, and place. This work took on three different expressions. Three different dimensions of one conceptual work.
Two ArcGIS student interns and one marine studies / art student collaborated with me to produce an interactive StoryMap, enabling visitors to scroll through the region and click on different points to learn more about the region and sound sources.
Interactive Sound/Light Sculpture, Gladys Valley Marine Science Building, April 1 - June 1
Join me physically on my run through Newport’s four regions! Acouspade ultrasonic directional stereo speakers create magical audio bubbles where you hear sound coming from one specific region depending on where you stand in the hallway. Like wearing headphones with nothing on your head! Running (walking or standing) up and down the hallway transports you through these regions. The tempo-synced footsteps create a seamless crossfade across the different audio bubbles. Each person experiences the same rhythm but hears it differently depending on where the hallway they are. A colored light at each region responds to the sound, articulating differences of each region. Interpretive signs, like those you’d see at trailheads, help associate sounds with the happenings in each region.
4 mechanical engineering students and one Honors thesis student collaborated with me to produce the rigging and mmWave proximity sensor system.
Fixed Media Concert Piece
The final expression of this material and process is a sound composition with a choreographed path through the coastal regions. It is finished, but will wait to be premiered at the July 23rd Hydrophonics concert at Hatfield’s Marine Science Building Auditorium.
Hydrophonics | The Sound, The Science, The Story - Live
July 23, 2026
My residency will wrap up in a culminating concert, talk, and Q&A in the Hatfield Gladys Valley Marine Science Building Auditorium. Three world premiers, live performances, sound compositions, and some remarks about each work will be presented. It a way to share with the community many of the significant things I experienced and learned while getting to work here.
Marine Science Day, 04.11.26
Many of my students came out to Hatfield Visitor Center to present our work to a community of over 2000 people for the Marine Science Day event. An amazing celebration of all the science and effort that takes place here. My wife and kid helped me set up the AiR booth in the Visitor Center and seven students took shifts from 10AM to 4PM assisting with interacting and sharing their work experiences with the public. Many students participated in the event, proudly showing off their skilled craftsmanship to their families. I had many friends drive in from out of town to come experience and celebrate this time with me and it was truly an unforgettable time. A special thanks to my Family, student collaborators (and their friends and family), Hatfield staff, and friends who all made this event possible.
