Reuben Son

When I was younger, I first wanted to be a filmmaker, or a furniture designer, or a guitarist (which I did sometimes record and still play for myself). While these impulses and gestures towards future selves have ebbed and flowed over the years, I still feel broadly and intensely drawn to certain kinds of objects and aesthetic experiences.

Over the last decade, my energies have settled, through desire paths and tributaries, into software, sound, and ceramics. I would characterize my approach to these disciplines to be sculptural in a broad sense, in which the resulting object (experience) is dependent on the accretion of smaller, more intuitive decisions, as opposed to starting from a dogmatic schema and working backwards.

“The aesthetic moment is a caesura in time when the subject feels held in symmetry and solitude by the spirit of the object.”

- Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object

I have found that the locus of vitality exists in material engagement with the world, within only a loose framework of epistemology, a minimum viable ontology. Regarding this, I find myself somewhere in the continuum of Simone Weil, who wrote “to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work […] only the cycle contains the truth”, and Ray Peat, who wrote “energy creates organization and structure”.

The projects below represent an incomplete index of my creative work between the period of 2009 to the present. Registrations of organization and stucture. I’m still figuring things out, but I’m happy you’re here and I hope you enjoy perusing some of the things I’ve made along the way. While none of these projects are truly finished, I do feel like this body of work has connecting throughlines, and has given me the space to think and to feel … and if not find answers, to at least ask better questions.

For more about this website, see Colophon.

Selected Projects

• MIDI Archive 1 ML model and archive of music on the early web
• Frog Chorus 2 Summon a chorus of frogs from your phone
• Airports for Music 3 Sound as fragrance
• Meandering Ceramic Printing 4 3D printing ceramics at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
• Selected Ceramic Works 5 Material explorations into surface and form
• Composing Through Listening 6 Radio broadcast for WFMU
• Weaving Music 7 Sound as a woven textile
• HOBO UFO 8 Audio-reactive Street View built for James Hoff
• QCVG 9 Programmable modular synthesizer
• Private Chronology 10 DIY music label, exclusively distributed by Mimaroglu Music Sales