For the project, I did a lot of metal fabrication and soldering. I also designed the sticker seen above, based on an initial spec by the concept artist Neko Gray and the sculptor and leatherworker Adam Smith (of Steampunk Canada).

There were hundreds of hours of work put into this project by an enormous team of people. Burning Man, BurnT, and independent fundraising paid for the project’s completion and sponsored the transportation and installation of the piece.

• The Heart Machine, official Burning Man honorarium page
• The Heart Machine, Globe and Mail article

Materials: Ball jam jar, wine crate, labelling, human teeth.

Bodies are tricky fleshy things. We’re agreed on this point, humans – bodies swell and change and flux and ache and for some bizarre reason, our hardware and our software are not clearly delineated after best practice. Maybe best practice is incorrect – perhaps you should always be able to read the rot on the surface. If my laptop visibly decayed, I might be less upset every time it spontaneously dies from a motherboard error.

A thought for the next round.

This piece came out of growing my hair back in. I had a topknot for a while, which netted cat-calls, and then brutally short hair, which resulted in wary distance from everyone. Growing my hair back to shoulder length got me strangers in bars taking liberties, touching me more often than I liked. So I made a jar for their teeth, because fitting in shouldn’t mean giving up.

The fabricated sculpture of a fire-spitting valkyrie who conveniently stores in her own barrel was the result of that day, and an inspiration to further explosive ideas.

The microphone on the front of the vitrine would detect people talking in the vicinity, causing the hand to claw forward through notes – not shown – and slowly destroying them. The idea is that we often reach further than we can possibly grasp, and that our reach can sometimes damage the meaning of work to the point where people disconnect. Artwork should express its own meaning in its own clear language, and not hide behind bullshit.

It is vaguely ironic that the piece as a whole is a lot of BS; I learned a lot about electronics to make this happen, and lit many things on fire, including, in the end, a lot of the hand itself. If hacking requires failure to have eventual success, then this piece was my winner.

Every knot in every tendon hand-tied, every joint individually glued. One day it will grind horribly again!

Almost all my logo designs start as a sketch based on one or two letters or symbols. hacklab.TO’s logo is based on the idea of a dancing martini glass and a light-emitting diode, since it’s a social club for hackers, and there seems to be nothing hackers love more than the not-so-humble LED. Emma Heillig’s translation services logo, on the other hand, needed to convey a sense of reliable dignity. Emma also works out of the EU, primarily in the Euro currency, so I worked that in with the double-L of her last name.

Monograms are tricky to design, but once done, they have a huge impact, with much more life than conventional swiss-box logos. That’s why I love them.

Hand and foot, extremities are flexible, detachable, the thing you cut off to show you have more power than the other guy. They’re the bits you take; a finger, a toe, a foot, a hand, a thief, something stolen. Bits of bone and the company logo.

Making artwork about horror is disingenuous in Hamilton, Ontario, where the horror is that the industries are selling out, that there is no more Canadian steel. People are not routinely physically mutilated in Hamilton, and that means it’s easy to comment on mutilation. Mutilation is an un-thing here. It is a nightmare for the films, the news, not a thing which happens to people.

A lot of Canadian art suffers from being so protected. We can make dresses of meat, abused cat films, and Memento Mori, but our lives are among the longest and softest in the world, and we are protected children within the G20. The genuine voices of the unheard within the country are the aboriginal.

We should have had a three-leaf flag.