The Impish Inventor

NJ: I don't think either one is universally true. But the worst insult is when engineers call me an artist, or when artists call me an engineer.

How do you explain your love for both nature and technology?

Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.

Are you always playful?

Except when I am ordered to play. I watch children a great deal; their idea is that rules are always negotiable, whereas you absolutely cannot joke at the airport about your toothpaste, and you cannot rollerblade in Grand Central Station. I keep running up against these things.

How do you get in trouble?

There is video of me getting harangued by fourteen Los Angeles police officers and seven United Airlines staffers for rollerblading between connecting flights. It's hard not to notice that the vast empty halls of airports were designed for rollerblades. And everyone I pass smiles.

Do you jump from one project to another out of impatience?

Yes, and I don't think that's entirely bad, though I felt bad about it for a long time. Juggling many projects and having all these accidental collisions that you can't predict enables a kind of comparative thinking. To focus on a single project from beginning to end is extremely difficult, not just for me but for many people.

How did your childhood shape you?

We had seventeen horses growing up. I did a lot of cutting up big toads and growing mung beans with various doses of Valium that I took from my father's clinic. I got expelled from high school a month before graduation. I wanted to see the force of the fire hose.

Your kids are named Mister Jamba-djang Vladimir Ulysses Hope (daughter, 19), E Harper Nora (daughter, 8), and Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles (son, 6). Do you consider them an art project?

No, no, they're more than an art project. They're a science project!

What's the hypothesis?

Are kids smarter than adults? All evidence points to that being true. One of my favorite projects of Yo's is his "bullet bouncer backer" or BBB gun. It can't shoot bullets. It can only bounce bullets back. He invented this not long after he'd learned the golden rule, which has many interpretations. Children grapple with the structure of civil society in a way that adults have long forgotten to question. So my kids are also a political science experiment. And though they think I'm hideously embarrassing, my kids are absolutely not embarrassed by their names. Their names, as names are, are totally normal to them.

What do you hope people who visit the Bird Condos will think about?

Will birds urbanize? Do they shop? How do they share? Do birds use weapons? Will they self-medicate? They might get a sense of Manhattan as connected to and dependent on natural systems.

You've been called gimmicky.

That's good. Whatever works. I think clever, novel gimmicks work better than trite ones. For my current project, I produced a series of birdhouses—yes a gimmick, but not only a gimmick, an actual exploration of a model urban development. Don't you think Robert Moses might have experimented with his ideas at scale before tearing down vibrant neighborhoods?

What about you is conventional?

I am hopeful about the technological future and our capacity to direct it.

Do you want your conceptual-art ideas to be popular?

I aspire to be popularly legible, or at least legible to diverse audiences. My upside-down trees, which are at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, have been reproduced as a fridge magnet. But I'm not sure how that allows people to interpret or question the work.