Sometime in 2002 I began slowly collecting materials, mostly from job sites around Boston and bringing them to a property in Rockport Maine.  The design for the building followed organically as I gathered materials, I laid out wall sections specifically for each salvaged window and beam counting on the momentum of accumulation to help guide the process.   As the years progressed the building was finished little by little with the help of friends and partners and as each piece of surplus and detritus from the streets started to compose the structure, it formed a patina of experiences, every object brought into Castle Bravo has a distinct story, each floor board and salvaged fixture carries not only it’s past life but the new story given by it’s inclusion in my tiny home.   Currently the Castle Bravo serves as a refuge, a sort of research outpost, and an ongoing psycho-architectural exploration; on entering the Castle I can feel my sense of identity shift in very real ways, and the space in that shifting is where I feel most at home…

Translation, 2002 from ethan kiermaier on Vimeo.

An Obtuse Transmission is a mobile installation which takes three streams of morse code text and translates them into a rhythmic light and sound pattern which loops indefinitely.  The audio created by the piece is the result of a series of contact microphones which are glued to the relay’s controlling the lighting.  Transmission plays with re-contextualizing simple data into architecture and music.

Moonshot from ethan kiermaier on Vimeo.

Moonshot Self Portrait takes many otherwise disparate and discrete sources of information and re-composites them into a single channel, formal arrangement.  The room in which the installation was installed is south facing and the sun tracks through the space during the afternoon in a distinct arch of light split by the window mullions.  During the day, I traced three transits of the light at hourly intervals in order to give order to the layout of the objects and formal elements of the piece.  Objects included are mostly culled from my everyday experience, but also include elements of intentional metaphor, the raw wool for instance, drawing a straighter line between the sun’s energy and intent and the evolution of industrial production from a direct harvest of the fruits of solar congress, to a mode of transformation peculiar to humans in which the energy encapsulated in sunlight is transmuted into a new reality in the form of products based on or manufactured through the use of petroleum.  One track of sound included in the piece is the sound of the sun as recorded by NASA over the course of a year and compressed into a twelve minute loop.  The volume of the audio throughout the twelve minutes is determined by a graph of the temperature over the same year as recorded in South Boston Massachusetts where the piece was installed.  The second audio track which emanates form the high loudspeaker, is a recording of the mission control audio from the 2009 effort by NASA to shoot a rocket into the moon and analyze the resulting dust cloud to better determine the composition of the lunar surface.  This event, which to my mind was a bizarre and dramatic piece of concrete theater,  received little play in the media or collective consciousness.  In an environment saturated by high drama events and manufactured emotional pitch, the assault on the moon seems to have gone unnoticed.  The pitch of the mission control audio is determined by the stock price of Exxon Mobil corporation of the course of the year previous the installation.  The overlays of information in the piece, while not immediately apparent, give it an air of absurdity and tension when exposed.  The combination of my mundane daily life with some of the realities underpinning it, often obtuse and ridiculous, created a piece of dramatic architectural theater.

Ankizy Isaka Rehetra from ethan kiermaier on Vimeo.

Conceived of a two channel video installation, Ankizy takes footage I shot while working in rural Madagascar and juxtaposes it with two streams of text taken from emails sent between myself and my lover who was unable to accompany me due to an illness.  The feeling of displacement while travelling, the sense of loss around diverging experiences, and a sweet sadness in the midst of chaos.  Ankizy was originally installed using the reed mats which had formed our communal area in Madagascar and the smell created an olfactory element, mixing with the scent of the sweet annie between the video projections, a smell I associate with Maine in the fall, a place we were both set to return to when my trip was over.