2023
4″ x 3″ x 5″
Bronze
Kneeling down before the phone god.
Author Archives: Doug
Tree of Knowledge? (Miniature Series)
2023
5″ x 2″ x 4″
Bronze
A series of 5 small bronze castings of the Tree of Knowledge sculpture.
Driftwood Selfie
2023
12″ x 15″ x 19″
Driftwood, resin
I was inspired (horrified?) by seeing so many people out in nature doing nothing but posing for selfies for social media. If humans can look so ridiculous out in nature, maybe nature should too?
The driftwood was found on the beach at Pajaro Dunes, south of Santa Cruz, CA. Photos below are taken at the same beach.
Me, Through the Machine
2023
11″ x 7″ x 10″
Bronze
This self portrait was generated by using a 3D scanner to scan my face, illustrating how the technology imperfectly sees me. The result is full of artifacts. Pieces of skin floating above my face, deranged features, soulless eyes. This is how the machines see us.
The 3D scan that the scanner produced is shown below in all its disturbing glory:
And here are a few other scans for your nightmares:
Inception
2023
Resin
19″ x 12″ x 18″
It’s a selfie arm taking a selfie of a selfie arm taking a selfie of a selfie arm…
Tree of Knowledge of Questionable Good and Irrefutable Evil
2023
Resin
14″ x 12″ x 12″
Camp Fire Progression
Iron, bronze, 2022
This iron and bronze sculpture maps the movement of the Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California in November 2018. It’s a map of the fire perimeter, with the majority of the sculpture in rusted iron. The boundary of the town of Paradise is in polished bronze inlaid into the larger sculpture.
The height of the sculpture represents the time at which that area burned. The lowest parts represent where the fire started. You can trace the movement of the fire by following the sculpture from the low areas to the higher areas. The Camp Fire started near the middle of the fire footprint, just east of the town of Paradise, CA.
The Impact of the Camp Fire
The Camp Fire began November 8, 2018 and was fully contained on November 25, 2018. 85 people lost their lives. It destroyed over 18,000 structures, many of them in the town of Paradise, CA. This sculpture highlights the town of Paradise, however, it’s important to note that other towns, such as Concow, Magalia, and Butte Creek Canyon were also largely destroyed. It is the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.
The Data
The source data was downloaded from NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System). The dataset consists of points with timestamps indicating when burn activity was detected.
You can watch an animation of the fire progression to get a sense of how the fire spread and what the sculpture represents:
Or here’s another animated map of the same data, color coding the burned areas by day:
The Process
I wrote code that converted that raw point data into a 3D model. That model was 3D printed, then I made a mold of the printed sculpture and cast it to wax. Then I used the lost wax casting method to create the iron sculpture and the separate bronze section. Metal casting was done at the Crucible in Oakland, CA.
Walled NYC
Concrete, plywood, enamel, and paint, 2017
Much of the rhetoric around immigration to the U.S. in recent years has centered on the Trump administration’s proposal to build a wall along the southern border. The effects of this debate on immigrant cities that are far from such physical borders is less visible, but in New York City, whose airports offer the first port of entry for many immigrants, the impacts of immigration policy are no less meaningful. In this sculpture, data artist Doug McCune physicalizes the barriers that many would-be immigrants face: a combination of restrictive policies, anti-immigrant sentiment, and economic realities.
The work shows a concrete wall surrounding New York City. The height of each section is proportional to the number of immigrants living in New York who originally came from the various directions on the globe. The routes were mapped as an airplane would fly from each region of New York City to the country of origin. McCune determined the height by calculating the number of immigrants “crossing” each section of the city border. This piece challenges us to ask: what would New York be without immigrants? How close will we get to finding out?
Source: The map uses data on country of origin for all foreign-born residents from the 2017 American Community Survey five-year estimates.
This work was commissioned for the You Are Here NYC exhibit at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Sep – Nov, 2017.
HayWired Shake Map
Bronze sculpture of a hypothetical magnitude 7 earthquake along the Hayward fault in the Bay Area. The data for this sculpture is from the USGS’s HayWired Scenario, which predicts what a large earthquake might do to the Bay Area.
The height of the sculpture represents the shake intensity at that point, reminding us how fragile our stability really is.
Weaponized Counties – 2016 US Election Sculpture
This pair of sculptures divides US counties into two sets: those in which Donald Trump won a majority of the 2016 US presidential election votes and those in which Hillary Clinton won a majority. Clinton assembled powerful urban centers to build her political base, with solid margins in most dense cities. Donald Trump, on the other hand, amassed a vast rural expanse of the less populated counties in the country. These counties were weaponized in the fight for the presidency, and this narrative of urban vs rural is visualized here in sharp, violent imagery, meant to evoke futuristic weapons turned on each other.
The counties are represented as their geographic shapes, with a thickness representing the number of votes the majority candidate received in each county. Counties are arranged along an x-axis from left to right, symbolizing the percentage of the county that voted for the left (Clinton) vs the right (Trump). The counties are rotated at random, melding with one another into a cutting, dangerous form. By comparing this visualization technique across both candidates we can see a stark difference in the makeup of the electorate.
Clinton Majority Counties
Trump Majority Counties