Year of production: 2015. Running Time: 2:07 min

Color / Sound

Synthesis is about the segregated ideas of nature and technology combining into one unit. They are forced to exist together in a complicated, competitive relationship, ever changing and evolving.

The Styrofoam creates the top half of the work, representing technology or the manmade. In modern times, technology and the manmade dominate our world and existence, which is why it is placed above nature.

The branches of dead cholla cactus create the bottom half, representing nature. By placing nature on the bottom, it suggests that we consider nature as less than technology and, yet, nature acts as the roots or origin which technology stands upon. Nature is the origin of everything, in one form or another. Or, nature reclaims technology with time (erosion or abandonment). Using the cholla specifically incorporates New Mexico’s natural environment into the piece, especially in such an industrial setting as the rail yard.

The middle potion represents a threshold between the two, which goes along with the OneBeat 2014 theme of “threshold,” defined as a point of entry or beginning. The threshold acts as a point, which the imagery changes, such as a light beaming down the Styrofoam and spreading into a rainbow among the branches (as light through a prism). Ultimately, the nature imagery changes into technological graphics, once past the threshold and visa versa.