Tim Berners-Lee: Providence

In 2017, I was commissioned by Facebook (now Meta) to create a sculpture for the Oculus (now Meta Quest) headquarters in Seattle. They let me come up with whatever I wanted, so I created an alter to Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web. I thought it was especially appropriate given Facebook’s power in the space and also Berners-Lee’s early outspoken warnings against networks like Facebook. As early as 2010, he was saying social networks would create "closed silos of content" that may threaten the Internet's status as a "single, universal information space." So I put an alter to this incredible human in one of their offices. :-)

I also made the sculpture cool as hell. It’s about 4 feet tall and mounted on the wall. Within, there is a scene featuring TimBL that can be viewed through a wide-angle lens. It makes the interior space seem huge and it’s lit within by LED lights. The whole thing was digitally sculpted and 3D-printed, assembled, and then hand-painted. It’s one of my all-time favorite things that I’ve ever made.

Unfortunately, after it had been in their offices for a year, it was somehow damaged. It was probably dropped while being moved but who knows. I said I’d be happy to repair it on site if they paid for my flight, but then never heard back from them. :-(