I had the opportunity to interview Father Goose for a story recently — a nicer fellow you could not imagine. Here is the text of the interview:

JM: How did you first become involved with creating kids’ music.

FG: Dan and I were hanging out and he had this idea to make a tape and asked me to sing on the tape. And I was joking around and I did the “Father Goose Medley,” the ABCs. To me it was just clowning around.

JM: What were you doing at the time musically?

FG: I was still in the dancehall band as Rankin’ Don, doing more hardcore stuff. I was a doing a lot of that, I had a couple records out, I was touring.

JM: How long did it take you to transition into the kids’s stuff?

FG: It took a while. At first, it was “Can I do both of them?” and then “If I choose one, which should I choose?” I actually gave it a lot of thought after the passing of my father. I took some time in San Francisco just to clear my head. Thinking of the type of person that he was, the obvious choice was with kids, because he was the type of person who liked to bring kids together, join them, do teams like cricket, soccer teams, he liked to do that sort of stuff. I figured somewhere along the line it was probably my calling.

JM: Is your family musical?

FG: In the sense that they loved to listen to music. They don’t go out very much, but they loved to entertain at home. They loved to play music and invite friends over and have a good time.

JM: You were born in Jamaica — when did you come to the United States?

FG: I came to this country at a very young age, around four or five, and spent all my summer vacations, whether in Brooklyn or in Florida or in Canada or in London, but mostly in Brooklyn, East Flatbush.

JM: When did you first become interested in music?

FG: As a kid, I remember I used to play the stereo from the age of five. I had my first record that my mother bought me — “This Train” by a group called Culture.

JM: Was that the stuff you liked growing up?

FG: Not particularly, I was just fascinated that you put something on the turntable and it had everyone dancing and enjoying themselves. I was fascinated by that, “Wow, this is something that makes somebody have a good time!” That really drew my interest.

JM: When did you start doing music and performing out?

FG: It’s kind of hard to figure, I didn’t actually decide that I wanted to do this, it just happened around friends, they got a big kick out of what I was doing and one thing lead to another. I would never look at it as something I was trying to do as a career, I look at it as something I’m doing just for the fun of it. My stuff as dancehall was mostly comical, I’d tell jokes.

JM: Do you still do any music strictly for grown-ups?

FG: The only thing I ever do for grown-ups is for the parents who come to the shows, for them to get involved in what I’m doing. I love where I’m at right now and I love the type of music that I do right now. To me, it’s a blessing that Dan opened my eyes to this type of music.

JM: It’s interesting hearing your vocal style put in context of all sorts of folk music and blues and even sea shanties.

FG: I always tend to experiment from back in the dancehall days. I never like to do the same thing over and over again, a then be then c. I always try to do something different and way out. Because of that, it made it easier when Dan was showing these off beats to me and I could be a part of it and have fun with it.

JM: Has this all opened up some musical styles to you that you’ve come to like working with more than before you started?

FG: Yeah. I would say it allows me to be me. Doing dancehall is more like acting, I tell everyone that. Sometime I’d have a hard audience and I’d have to play that role, even though I’m not hard. I’m a kid inside, so doing this type of music is perfect, it’s how I see myself on stage, it’s like walking out in my living room and having fun.

JM: What do you think about when you’re choosing songs to perform?

FG: Something has to hit me. Most likely I get my inspiration late at night, like two or three o’clock in the morning, and sometimes when I’m in Florida, I’ll be on the beach at this time, and I’ll see how it moves me and I’ll say “Okay, I’d like to perform that.”

When it comes to performing, it depends on the mood of the people, most of the time that’s how I select what I’d like to play next. A lot of people like to plan, their shows have a set list, my band kills me for that sometime, not all the time, but when there’s a set list, I’ll want to change it because I think they’re in the mood for this song more than the other one. I think that I get that from being a disc jockey, where I would never preselect my songs before a party. You have to go see the crowd, see the vibe of the people, for them to enjoy themselves. It’s the same concept.

JM: It seems like a difficult job to figure out what appeals to kids and figure out what appeals to adults and then figure out what appeals to both and work with that.

FG: Funnily enough, I don’t worry about that, maybe because I’m a big kid, so I tend to give me my experience, what I love, and usually they seem to like the type of music that I like and it seems to be working for me. I don’t tend to worry about what people like, you can drive yourself crazy that way. If it’s good music, people enjoy it.

JM: You work a lot with kids on the albums — in fact, on Dan’s albums, it seems like all your songs are centered around working with the kids. Can that be challenging?

FG: It’s fun for them to have their input. You ask them what they think, how they feel about it. You work together, you give them the idea you have in mind, something like that. I like to have it where it’s call-and-respond. When I first laid down a track, I make sure that I have a lot of space there for the kids to come in and sing the ABCs so that I’m the one whose singing it out and the kids sing along. It’s pretty cool working with kids.

JM: Are there any areas that you’d like to go into musically that you haven’t yet?

FG: Its a journey and I’m at the beginning of my journey, from my childhood coming to Brooklyn, and there are a lot of different styles of songs that I used to listen to as a kid growing up and I didn’t get to put them on this album. The next album you’re definitely going to hear some more stuff, definitely like rock and roll and a little country and western. Growing up in Jamaica, we used to listen to a lot of country and western songs.

Sometimes me and Dan, we’re joking, and people will ask, “Who on Earth is that?” They never heard of Marty Robbins. “Who is Marty Robbins?” So I’ll say, okay, let’s bring it back, how about “Kenny Rogers?” That’s my background. Songs like “One O’Clock, Two O’Clock, Three O’Clock Rock.” It’s a journey and I haven’t reached that side of it yet.

JM: In Brooklyn and New York City, there’s a lot of music in the air, and a lot of varied styles. That seems very reflected in both your and Dan’s music.

FG: I like it when people come together, you bring a little bit of your culture, I bring a little bit of my culture, we mix it together and make something wonderful. My whole concept is that if we can bring the whole world together through music, why not?

There’s nothing I like better than hopping in my car at 3 o’clock in the morning, popping in a CD and just driving and everything just all comes together.

JM: What music do you listen to these days?

FG: I don’t listen to a wide variety of stuff. At night to put me to sleep, I listen to old country, it puts me and Baby Goose to sleep. Maybe a little old jazz. Or maybe we rock each other to sleep.

JM: Do you still go to Jamaica?

FG: Yes, I do. I’m such a house rat when I go to Jamaica. I stay inside, walk around the yard. My mom is there now, she moved back. I don’t have to really leave, everything is here, oranges, coconuts, mangoes, everything is right here for my enjoyment.

A lot of people would like to say, “I’m from the rough part of Jamaica,” but I am not. That’s the sad truth. I can’t say that I’m coming from the streets, I can’t say that. It’s pretty comfortable. It’s in the suburbs, a gated community. Everyone knows everyone in the area. Even when I was in school out there, it was the same thing.

JM: How many children do you have?

FG: I have one daughter, 13, and I have a son, almost two months.

JM: How do your kids effect the music?

FG: My daughter made me change from the hardcore stuff. She’s listening, my mom’s listening, you realize that you have a responsibility. She’s on the album.

JM: Do use a lot of the same musicians from Dan’s album or a crew of your own?
FG: I did use some of the musicians on Dan’s albums, but I use a lot of my friends who are musicians as well.

JM: Are these guys you were working with before you did the kid’s music?

FG: Some of them. They understand the direction that I’m going in and it’s fun for them as well. It’s a good thing. I show them, this is what I’m doing, and they become a part of it, they like it and then they can try it.

JM: The kids music thing is a new movement and a growing one and now you’re bringing in guys and that may just expand it and perpetuate it.

FG: That’s exactly how I see it. I do my share, somebody comes in and adds what they can to it, it’s like we’re having a big barbecue, everybody brings their own little flavor and their own spice and everything and we all come together and have this huge cookout and we all enjoy themselves. At the end of the day, everybody feels great and they all go home with a nice smile on their face.

JM: Sometimes do they bring spices that you didn’t expect but you’re happy they did?

FG: Some of these guys, I’ve known forever, I’ve known since the 80s. Like Evil Screecher Dan. I remember after doing this music for a while and I ran into Screecher Dan and he said “This music you’re doing, it’s different,” and I said, “Yeah, I feel like you’re the perfect person for this type of music because of the way your mind thinks,” and he was laughing. When it came time for me to do an album, I brought him on it, it was a blast, we were just making up stuff right there on the spot. Everyone adds their own little flavor and when I see the reviews I’m getting for this album, I have to thank everybody who actually came in and did their share.

JM: How does it translate to a live show?

FG: When we perform, you can see the whole picture come together, the whole puzzle. Sometimes, I have to catch myself, because I tend to want to stand and soak it all up, forgetting that I’m performing. I have to stop tear rolling down my cheek because I’m so happy that this is an idea that I had, we worked it out in the studio — and then there’s the audience, the kids and the parents and how well they’re enjoying it. Sometimes it really comes to me deep down and I have to stop myself – “Whoa! I’m doing a show now, let’s think about this later!”

And she has other biospheres as well, of varying sizes with different reasons for their being, including some that hang from ceilings and allow visitors to pop their heads inside them.

Bell is currently showing at Mass MoCA in the Badlands show — this is the interview I did for an article about her work.

JM: Is there any upkeep a person has to do on these or are they pretty self-sustaining?

VB: They’re fairly self-sustaining. I get reports back from people sometimes about them. You can open them up and water them. That’s what the instructions are. You have to keep an eye on it, you can’t sit it on top of a radiator. You have to pay attention to it. If it looks like it’s drying out you can add some moisture to it or move it to a better location. The moss that’s inside, which is the main life that’s inside, it actually likes being in a little, damp space like that. It’s a hardy plant, actually.

JM: Does the moss ever try to push past the boundaries or do the boundaries define how far it will grow?

VB: The boundaries define how far the moss will go although if it was in its natural state, it would slowly spread. It does create a tiny piece of fenced off property that’s contained in this little tiny world.

JM: Some of the containers look like the eggs you get in grocery store machines, but others look like globes.

VB: I’ve used both of those, different shapes of plastic containers, and the ones that have a colored bottom and a domed top, they actually work better because they are easier to open up and take care of it and close it back up.

There’s another thing on the Web site called a portable personal biosphere that was a smaller version, really a public performance set, this little helmet that you could wear on your head. I was playing with the idea of what we really yearn for when we’re in an urban location and we feel a need — a physical and emotional necessity — to be around living things that we often don’t have in a really urban place, so this is a satire of that with this dome that you could wear over your head and it has this green horizon that was this layer of mosses right in front of your nose. You wouldn’t have to smell the exhaust fumes from the cars and everything would be muffled, so it’s a really personal piece of nature but also absurd.

Then I made these larger scale ones that I call personal home biospheres as a continuation of this idea that you could have this personal biosphere in your home, with this absurd image of this person sitting on a couch watching television but in this biosphere and that you could customize it and have this natural environment with your personal kind of environment. There were some that had moss in them, but there were also some that had tropical plants in them as well. They started off as just these singular domes, and since then — that was in 2004 that I made those pieces — I started the little pocket biospheres at the same time I did those as this idea that, especially when there’s an interaction in a gallery or an art space, I like the idea that there’s the work carries out into the public realm. The pocket biosphere is this way that the work becomes intimate.

Since then I’ve made another home biosphere that is a biosphere for two persons called “A Biosphere Built For Two” and it’s a more domestic space. The piece that’s going to be at Mass MoCA is called “Village Green” and it takes this idea of these home biospheres and extrapolates it into this New England village, so there’s this whole collection of biospheric dwellings that are for different numbers of people and some of them evoke this New England town with classic house shapes and others evoke the rolling hills and the dome of the sky, the curve of the original ones, so it’s going to be a combination of those two forms.

JM: Visually and conceptually, there’s a huge science fiction component to it.

VB: That’s in my mind in a tangential way where I feel like the kind of process that I have for coming up with these ideas is that I’m really interested in gathering different cultural references. I’m fascinated with all the various and problematic and hopeful ways that we conceive of how we relate to nature and this futuristic, dystopian vision where we’re cut off from nature or we have to build this alternate reality for ourselves, it’s one of those visions that especially manifests in this work.

JM: You think about the history of public parks in urban areas and the idea of having these islands of green, and you’re taking it to a whole other level.

VB: I’m really interested in the aspect of this work that can show that there is an absurd, humorous side to this type of relationship with nature, that it’s a little bit crazy. Maybe if we look at that we start to see other possibilities also.

JM: The portable personal biosphere makes me think about the human need for light and seasonal affective disorder and the special lights people buy. It’s a similar psychological faking out.

VB: Yeah, or this intensive care unit kind of feeling where there’s this very artificial life that somebody created, a kind of crude approximation of the original ecological system, which is also interesting to me, because you read a lot about restoration efforts and all these things where we’re trying to recreate natural systems that we’ve altered in some ways, and how complex they are, and the difficulty and impossibility of that. The human struggle and failure is also fascinating to me.

JM: Is there much of a connection for you between the city and the nature outside it?

VB: I moved here from New England, I lived in Boston for many years. I think it’s still a little bit of a field/forest thing. The difference is, Seattle’s a large metropolitan area, but when you live in the east coast megalopolis, you’re very far from landscapes that are really uncontrolled, and I think there’s really a different mentality on the west coast where people can literally drive for an hour and suddenly there is this place that’s not a farm, not a suburb. Maybe it’s more clear cut there, but relationships to the landscape are different. To me that’s still something I bring into my work and the work that I’m showing at Mass MoCA would have a different meaning and different context if I were to show it here.

JM: My impression has been that it’s a lot like Canada, where you leave a city and you’re nowhere.

VB: Exactly. It’s very strange. It gives you this strange sense that you’re at the end of the continent, you’re on the coast. In Seattle, you can go north to Vancouver and Vancouver has it even stronger, this sense. Talk about futuristic — glass towers, this dense urban, but then literally if you were to drive not long at all you’re in areas that are not dominated by humans in that kind of way at all, it’s this feeling like you’re at the end of the world.

JM: Do you generally find urban art world people clued into nature or cut off from nature?

VB: That’s a good question. It’s hard to say art world people in general — or even people in general — but I think that people have so many different mythologies that they’re operating on, or methods of looking at things, but there does seem to be — especially in contemporary art right now, because it is so topical in a really, really intense way, the environmental crisis has been going on for decades now, climate change — this ground swell of artists doing things related to nature in really diverse ways. There’s a romantic side and there’s a cynical skeptical attitude that I find in other places, and then there are other people who are really engaged with the scientific and ecological policy-based side of it.

JM: Which part do you feel closest to? The science side?

VB: Yeah. I think that the way I like to think about it, I like to research from both sides. As an undergraduate, I was doing art classes, but I was also doing my research in what’s called “nature and culture,” so basically I’d have conversations with people who are biologists studying deep sea beds and then also have a conversation with an art historian and see these two vastly different kinds of methodology looking at the landscape or nature, whatever you want to call it. The way that those two encounter each other is really fascinating to me.

JM: Do you still pay a lot of attention to science, keep up with your reading?

VB: Yeah. I’m mostly interested in the ecological and biological sciences and the like. I also really enjoy the parts that are more everyday, like plant identification and horticulture and those kinds of things that are more tactile maybe. I have peers who come from a science background. The other thing that I probably spend more time paying attention to is reading about environmental policy and all the ways that our culture uses that information. In Seattle, the things I read about are often very local. I read about the different impacts on the future health of Puget Sound, or something, and thinking about those things.

JM: How do you look at your work in relation to the environmental crisis?

VB: Some of the projects I’ve done are most specifically engaged in using an activist stance than others. I did a collaborative project thats ongoing but started last year, a group of artists mapping and walking, creating a series of performances to mark up the potential sea-level rise in Seattle. That kind of work, to me, is important. As you can see from the work that’s at Mass MoCA, I feel that’s much more ambiguous and that’s one of my fascinations, playing with meaning. I guess that’s also the reason I feel like, as an artist, addressing these things through the venues and mediums of art is really valuable, because it does allow for ambiguity and asking questions. One wouldn’t necessarily do that in more of an activist context, perhaps.

JM: People do have a relationship with plants, even if they’re not nature people — potted flowers and lawns. It’s a very controlled relationship though, so I can see the biospheres tapping into that, it’s the way most people connect, but moss isn’t really the plant of choice for most people.

VB: It’s kind of a mundane plant. I was using moss in my work before I was on the west coast, but out here there’s moss killer in the hardware stores because people are trying to get rid of it so much. But it’s a really fascinating plant because it’s amazingly resilient.

I have this ongoing fascination with things being a microcosm that, both visually and conceptually, is itself and can stand in for something larger. Moss is this miniature thing in this Japanese garden kind of way, this bonsai kind of way, in which the human made and controlled landscape of the garden becomes representative of all those larger things — the large landscape, the sacred landscape — I’m interested in those kinds of references as well.

JM: Does moss actually have any beneficial properties in nature? I plead ignorance there. It seems like there’s always something that people thinks is icky that turns out to be great.

VB: It’s like a lot of low lying plants that we think of as ground covers that aren’t very noticeable — a lot of those trap groundwater, so I know that there are certain types of moss where, if there are toxins in the rainwater or the run off, the moss will actually leech that out the same way that the wetland catches the run-off from the road and captures it. So there is an element of it that’s like a natural sponge that can soak up poisonous substances.

JM: You’re lending a beauty to a plant that many people don’t look at in an aesthetic way.

VB: It’s kind of like putting them in a frame, sort of designating it as an aesthetic object, it’s an opportunity to give something an aesthetic value.

JM: Do you think by doing that, that’s how people can even qualify aesthetic value, they need these borders to point them out?

VB: I guess that’s part of it. My other hope is that this performance aspect of the action is about valuing something that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought about valuing. I’ve done other, similar ideas of the performance, with this adoption thing going on, with other plants. I have this thing called “the Cultivation Utility Vehicle” that I take around to public art events and I have it full of so-called “land,” which are these pieces of earth that might have some kind of plants growing in them, then I have this interaction that’s about “this plant’s free to a good home” and people say “What? You’re giving away something free?” and the conversation becomes “I’m only giving it away to people who express commitment and responsibility,” so it transforms from an object that could be a commodity to something that’s a relationship. The whole adoption performance is about that, seeing something and valuing it differently.

JM: It’s not much different from what groups that give away free seedlings for peoples to plant in their yards do — creating a personal value in these plants. Some people might think this is wacky, what you, but actually —

VB: It’s not really that strange! There is this continuum between activities that get called art and don’t get called art, so to do this in this context versus the Arbor Foundation doing it in their context, and the different manner in which it’s presented, thereby giving people a meaningful relationship to trees — this is a similar thing!

JM: When people wander up and think they might like to take a little biosphere at home, do you make them in front of the person?

VB: No, I have them made already, so they’re there, and then I have this adoption form set up. I say, “They’re up for adoption but you’re going to have to be prepared to take care of it. I usually show them the adoption form and it has it laid out on the form. There’s some do’s and do nots — do pay attention to it and check to make sure it has enough moisture, don’t run over it with your car or set it on top of the oven or abandon it. Then I ask them if they’re sure if they want to adopt and if they do, we go ahead with the paperwork and they take a biosphere.

JM: Do you do a lot of design with the personal home biospheres?

VB: It’s evolving, because it’s gotten a little more complicated in terms of the exact dimensions. The ones I made for Mass MoCA, I spent quite a while working on the design of them and then working with the computer and going back and forth with the design, the material, what’s possible and not possible. How they relate to each other in the space is also part of that. I’m interested in how when there’s more than one in a space and multiple persons, it’s not just about each person interaction with the piece but each person’s interaction with everyone else who’s participating in that piece, because if you’re in this dome-filled moss with someone else’s head a foot away from you, there’s this forced intimacy that happens that is a different interaction as well.

JM: Do you have any sense how your interests and obsessions blossomed over the years and what steered you to these examinations of space and perception?

VB: The history you tell yourself about yourself is always changing, but I feel like I’ve always, for a very long time, been fascinated by this. My interest in the subject matter of my work predates the knowledge that doing it in context of art was what I was going to be doing. I was very interested in relationship to place and environmental concerns for a long time growing up. Probably the biggest slice is that my entire family are landscape architects. I feel like if you spend a lot of time becoming attuned to how places affect you and how they affect people and how people affect their surroundings early on, to me that’s an incredibly rich, ever-expanding realm of exploration. That combined with, to my mind, a feeling of urgency is part of that exploration because we have to figure out a better way of doing things.

JM: Your whole family is made of landscape architects?

VB: Both my parents are and, ironically, my brother is now a landscape architect.

JM: Is there any point that you rebelled against that?

VB: I did end up becoming an artist instead, if that’s any different.

JM: An artist who takes her family profession and messes with it a bit.

VB: There’s a way in which the creative process sometimes becomes incredibly obvious but you don’t realize it and then, suddenly, I’m making these domes full of plants or I was making these landscapes on wheels, so doing this and thinking, “I’m making sculptures, I’m making sculptures,” and then, “I’m making sculptures about landscapes,” and then just looking at them and saying, “I’m making landscapes.” It’s just that they’re human scale, they’re directly related to the body in a way that’s more obvious than doing a site plan may be. It’s also about human relationships and the scale of the human body, but these are taking that to the extreme in a really obvious way, so, yeah, it’s taking all that context and playing with it and twisting it around.

JM: Do you ever get any feedback from your family?

VB: They’re pretty entertained usually, they’re usually pretty excited.

JM: Do you ever get any ideas from their work?

VB: I get ideas from hearing about things. One of the great things that’s actually wonderful about doing the work that I do is that I feel like there’s this absolutely fabulous freedom by doing things in an art context and there’s a whole different realm of concerns. Often I am thankful and I think, “What if I had gone into a profession where there was more pragmatic concerns overriding some of these?”

There are possibilities of other ways where people are thinking of very similar things but in very different applications and context. I like hearing about the way public processes happen, about how people come to decisions about how they want to design their small town or regulate their streetscape or whatever. These are really mundane things, but to me, hearing about them is always fascinating because it always reveals some underlying belief structure or thoughts about what’s a good place, how we see ourselves in relation to other species, belief systems that are hard to come out when you look at what kind of design process a town sets up.

JM: When you’re poking around in other towns, do you pay attention to town designs, city planning?

VB: Definitely. To me, that’s another ongoing question. I love to go to places and I have this sort of this psychogeographical attitude about the space. You walk through the space and have this vastly different changing physical and emotional experiences of places, but then I also often end up applying these very positive and psychological things and thinking about what it is that doesn’t have these positive effects on people, why are there people out on the street here but there’s not any people out on the street somewhere else? What is it that makes this place appealing or not appealing? What is it that’s made this into a vital public space — or this one’s not. What is it about the way this street looks, this corner of a highway or this vacant lot, what is it revealing about the history and the attitudes of everything that’s happened here?

JM: So this is what you do on a jaunt?

VB: Exactly, yeah! One of my favorite things to do, actually whether I know the place well or not, a place where I start off and explore, maybe there’s a map involved or maybe there’s some sort of directions, but that they’re very malleable and that there’s a way of experiencing the details that may not be the most obvious ones, and then see how the things reveal themselves.

JM: So every place is a microcosm upon a microcosm upon a microcosm, it’s an ever-revealing thing.

VB: Exactly. I like to collect pictures. When I lived in South Boston, I had these pictures that I felt were so emblematic of South Boston, like the person who had taken plastic pointsettas and stuck them all along their front yard to make it look like there were flowers growing. Stuff like that is so — I don’t know, it’s hard to even describe what that means, but it can be really touching.

JM: When did you first conceive of the firefly project?

JS: I was a first year grad student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, where I work now, and I was in a class called Networked Objects, a class in taking physical devices that you might see every day and you create yourself and you make them talk to each other over a distance. Could be a local environment such as a room or over the Internet or a cellular network.

I had this memory when I was going home over holiday break between the two semesters and I was talking with my sister and we talked about the fireflies that we used to catch in the summer time and we’d put them in an old Land O Lakes butter dish and punch the lid and we’d shake them and tap them to get them to light up. I guess we’d keep them in our bedrooms and by the morning they were all dead, but for that night, there was something nice about that. There’s a connection, we each had a jar in our room and we each had a little plastic butter dish in our room, full of these little blinking lights. I thought it would be a nice project to take on, one to see if I could do it but also to maybe make one for my sister that could do over the Internet from my apartment in Brooklyn to her home in Pennsylvania. Then I decided to make it smaller and work in a local environment.

The Mason jars themselves are that my grandmother would always can tomatoes and vegetables and she had a whole bunch of canning jars. The Mason Jars look really nice. I grew up in the Poconos, so that’s where most of my country boy comes from.

Fireflies, that was something you planned your night around. Fireflies are sort of the main attraction and then your cousins were over and you’d chase them down. A lot of reminiscing.

The technical side, what I really liked is that I had never seen a networked night light and I was wondering if you did that. Would people find a new way to say good night? And how big could the audience be if you had a dorm room or an orphanage, if each one had a night light, could they talk with each other? I want to see how many people could say good night in a different way.

On the other side is the networked object side. We tried to use Instant Messenger and cell phones and email to talk with each other, but it would have to be something lighter but still have context.

I don’t consider myself an artist, I’m more of a designer and a prototyper.

JM: What’s the state of the project currently?

JS: There are just three jars right now and they use a radio frequency, the standard old cordless phones used this frequency, and they each have six LEDs, three pairs of white, green and orange fireflies in its own jar and each jar has its own color, so if you tap on one jar, all the white lights will go on the other jars as well as itself, so you can identify who’s tapping which jar. You have one in your bedroom, and you would have the white one, and I would have the green one, so as I tapped you see the green lights go off in yours and you would know it’s me.

The radios go out they say 300 feet — that was two years ago when wireless for hobbyists were hard to get, but now they’re much easier to get and they say they can go a half a mile. You could have your neighborhood, you could give them to your kids friends, it’s a whole walking talkie scenario.

It doesn’t have to be in light, it could be little sounds, chirps and crickets and stuff like that.

JM: Could anyone use them, are they difficult?

JS: You just plug the jar in, you don’t have to configure it at all. It broadcasts itself and the other jars are just listening. Whenever the others are talking, they just start listening and they don’t have any control to talk back until the sequence is finished and the sequence is four seconds — anyone can tap on the jar for four seconds anyway they want and the others are listening for four seconds.

It’s a nice interface, it lets people jam on the jar, have a little firefly jam session.

JM: Is this the sort of work that usually interests you?

JS: The network side is really fun and the Networked Objects was one of my favorite classes.

I work on Assisted Technology at ITP, which is designing for disabled people. I’m always trying to figure out how I can give myself a project that I can work on networked objects with assisted technology and I think what I would really like to do is take something like the fireflies and give it to maybe a pediatric hospital or a hospital with people separated from families for a long amounts of time and let them communicate. It’s not to be like the telephone or email or that stuff, but to create a presence in the room. Like this is an extension. You could look at a telephone and it has a direct line to an operator who can connect you to someone else, but if you have one jar in your home — or some device — that’s directly connected to another person and you know it’s always them, it’s really nice I think.

JM: People do take comfort in inanimate objects that remind them of other people – this is a real application of that. Could you also use it as a signaling device?

JS: Totally. The idea is that when the telephone and the person who is hard of hearing will see that the light will flash and it will alert them that they have some sort of communication coming in. It could be on the person maybe, in the sense of the Life Alert, where the woman has a necklace with a button that she could push if she falls. That could also receive something, though that could be a little annoying.

JM: We’re talking about these practical, technological ideas, but there’s an elegance to it – it has an application but it’s also just a nice thing.

JS: People are like ‘Oh, you should sell them!’ I would love to sell them, but no one could afford to buy them right now. With the time put in and everything, it would be about $600.

It’s such a simple object that anyone with a little hobby electronics in them could build, but I think mass production would get rid of the glass jar, it would probably get rid of the touch sensor, they would probably on go 30 feet and put cheap parts in and it would lose all its flavor.

I feel like only Park Slope parents in Brooklyn could afford this for their kids, but it would be nice to make it available to people who really would want it.

I have a little free time, so I think I’ll be building some now. My sister’s pregnant, so I would love to get on in her kid’s room.

JM: Do-it-yourself has become a bigger movement, so it’s not unlikely that people might make these for themselves.

JS: It’s becoming so simple that anyone can pop these into a component board and make the same thing – maybe not in the same form factor, but make a prototype pretty quickly. I think that’s great.

I think information should be freely available.

JM: I keep thinking about mason jars decorated with cloth and beans and cookie mix – this is like a technological update of this crafter’s world object.

JS: People do give a lot of jars for gifts, don’t they? My mom gives the brownie in the jar, where it’s some kind of mix layered and it’s almost like a sand thing you would get at a carnival.

I had a weird obsession with Mason jars on eBay and for a while that was all I was searching for. You could get consistent sets on eBay, so they all looked the same, instead of going to a store and finding different shapes and sizes. Everyone knows Mason jars, so that’s nice, and they’ve been around since the 1910s or the 1920s, so they’ll be around longer, after we’re gone too, which is nice.

JM: I’m curious about the artist vs designer aspect for you. A lot of people have this desire to express their creativity in some manner, some people stick cookie mix into the jars, you sticks LEDs – does it open up things for you in regard to that? Can you see the art world a little more gray?

JS: It’s definitely more blurred. When I went to the gallery, I was talking to people . . . I went to Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and got to be with so many artists, I can totally have nice conversations with them, but they’re on a different level and I can appreciate that. I can help them technically and I can help them with the design and the programming, but what does it mean to be an artist? I guess that’s the question. Is it a quick category we put people in to decide things? I think the expression for myself was really nice.

Before I made these three jars, I made an earlier prototype a few weeks earlier. The girl I was dating at the time, it was her birthday, so I made her a jar with just yellow LEDs, six yellow LEDs — you’re tapping on it and they’re flashing back. She still has it — I don’t know if she has it on. I don’t think she has it on. That was more for her.

I’m not an artist because I can’t explain myself.

JM: A lot of artists don’t have that ability!

JS: I have no idea what fireflies actually blink for. Some people say it’s mating, some people say they blink before they die. A lot of people try to tell me different things, but I’ve never looked into it. I consider it a childhood mystery and I sort of want to leave it that way.

I was really interested in the fact that they’re out for a short time of day at a very specific time and they have a really short life span, which I think is beautiful in a way. I remember driving back through New Jersey from my aunt’s house and my parents’ house and there is this corn field that you drive by and right at the top of the stalk, I remember when corn was at its peak, the fireflies are coming out of the stalks, it was just this lovely scene. You wouldn’t even look at the sky because it was so nice to look straight ahead. I have no idea what fireflies do, they just do their thing. I think everyone has a story about why fireflies blink.

I was surprised to know that people in the west don’t have fireflies. I was visiting in Seattle and they were like ‘We’ve never seen a firefly.’ Oh, my god, a deprived childhood!

JM: Is networking your main interest?

JS: I love the Internet, I think the Internet is fantastic, but I can’t stand where the Internet is going right now, it seems like people are trying to turn the Internet in TV and an advertising platform.

There are simple things you can do when you have an Internet connection.

We have this Internet connections that connects people in a thousand different ways and we’re using the same sort of media, very passive, there’s a screen and you look at it. We go to work and we sit in front of a computer then we go home and we sit in front of a television, you’re not doing anything. But if you have these little items around your home that are also doing their own thing — it could be autonomous, it could be you using it or someone else contacting you. The whole Facebook thing where you read a feed about your friends doesn’t really do it for me.

We’re all overloaded with too much information, so if something can be running in the background and doing its work, that’s nice.

JM: Can envision a Facebook app that connects the fireflies over the Internet and allows friends to change the lighting in his house over the Internet?

JS: I don’t know how to really make circuits — when things start getting hot, I turn it off and then re-plug it in. We knew nothing about electricity, we had a general idea of what it does and how to not short things out. It’s fun to watch everyone.

There’s always the simple one of making a picture that can be networked and as you walk in front of it, it lights up the picture that’s opposite in someone else’s home – so we have pictures of each other and you walk past the picture of me in your home and the picture in my home would light up. It’s a common project for the networked objects class – it’s been done several times for the class, and yet you’ve never seen this in the world anywhere. I think it’s been done at least a dozen times at ITP.

JM: What else have you been working on?

JS: I’m working on a wheelchair dj system right now for assisted technology. It’s a ramp system and people on manual wheelchairs can ride up on these ramps and each wheel spins in a direction.

We met this 18 year old with cerebral palsy who was rapping to the nurses and we thought it would be great if we could rig up his wheelchair as a dj system. The left wheel fades and the right wheel scratches.

It’s almost like a bike trainer where you take your wheel and you lock it in. They sit on top of these rollers, he spins but he doesn’t move, so the wheels can detect a spin in a direction and it’s really fun to build. That was the whole thing with me staying at ITP as a researcher, just to bring out these designs from the assisted technology devices that could be used for creativity and expression. Most of the pieces are very sterile and feel like they’re straight out of a hospital. When we started making that, it was a group of two other guys and myself, it turned into this really big idea and we started noticing that other things weren’t allowing people to be expressive and use creativity, everything was just rehabilitation.

In my class, I’ve been teaching an assisted technology class, students have been adapting digital cameras and video cameras, I was really glad to see those projects come through, because they’re just simple hacking the remote controls of these devices, enabling people that can’t hold cameras to take pictures. One child was 14, and he had an obsession with Canon Powershots, so we went in and hacked the remote control for his Powershot and then took a gorilla pod, which is a gorilla tripod that has the flexible lengths, and it wrapped around the wheelchair arm and he was able to use a big button to take pictures – and he took pictures of his school dance – he had never taken pictures before. It’s a hard thing to consider, someone who’s 14 has never taken a picture before, and then just realize that he can’t really hold anyting.

We’re working with the veteran’s office in Newark and we’re going to try and adapt something for a guy who’s paralyzed. Really simple solutions, that’s what’s so great about it.

It’s a mish mash, we find stuff for each other to work on. If I could pull some grant money together and build ramps and build some other projects for acceptability and creativity, that would be an ideal job for me. I love doing those things.

JM: Do you have any plans for these in the wider scope, so that other people can use them?

JS: I don’t like patenting these things, I don’t mind making them open source. The occupational therapists are incredibly bright – you teach them how to solder and you teach them how to hook up switches and they get it right away, so I don’t mind making this stuff open source and putting it out there and saying ‘This is how you adapt a digital camera.’ And it could be a commercial project, because a lot of people don’t have time to make this stuff themselves.