Though my main practice focuses on technology and science fiction, I have spent over a decade making art with romance novels. To counteract insomnia caused by sci-fi dystopian nightmares, I read hundreds of romance novels to inspire nicer dreams. As I read them on my Kindle, I noticed Kindle Popular Highlights, the passages that most readers have highlighted. Surprisingly, Kindle Popular Highlights in romance novels were not the smut I expected. Readers were anonymously highlighting passages about grief, trauma, and loneliness. I memorialize these highlights onto porcelain commemorative plates (Captured by an Algorithm), create handwritten data visualizations (Writing Lines - A Labor of Love) where I write the Popular Highlights as many times as they were highlighted by readers (sometimes 1000s of times), and more.

As I did this, I began to notice that gazebos are frequently on the covers of romance novels though they are not ever mentioned in the books themselves. Once I realized this, I would buy romance novels with gazebos on them whenever I saw them, often at the grocery store. I now have a collection of over 100 of them. I wonder why gazebos are such symbols of romance and longing. What makes something a gazebo (cheesy, kitschy, romantic) vs. a pavilion (elegant and loved by contemporary architects)? To capture the emotion of the gazebo and take it with me, I plan to leverage my technical background to build a portable gazebo that folds into a suitcase, the GoZebo.

I am researching the history of gazebos, building portable gazebo prototypes, and experimenting with how to site gazebos in the environment. The GoZebo will have a highly engineered aesthetic made from machined aluminum, hardware and aluminum tubing from McMaster-Carr, and 3D printed parts. I plan to take the GoZebo on road trips and photograph it in all kinds of locations ranging from scenic overlooks to urban parking lots.