Critical 2025 Update

Hi everyone! Critical 2025 was such a great success! This was the first time I had ever had placed art at a 10-priciples event, which was such a huge milestone for me. I want to thank Critical for placing my art and rewarding me a grant to make it possible to bring this year. And I want to thank everyone who participated in Critical for making it one of the best, most connective places I’ve ever been. There’s no better place living the values of 10-princples!

If you’re looking for a link to the playlist that Ambisphere played, here it is on Spotify.

I plan to lay out all of the technical details soon on how I make Ambisphere work, so stay tuned for that. Until then, thanks for visiting! See you all next year in the woods!

  • Orbit

Welcome to Ambisphere

Enter this realm of light and sound, where serenity and connection await. Ambisphere is a tribute to the moments that remind us of our shared humanity and the profound beauty of presence. Born from a dream of cosmic connection and the soothing dance of music and light, this sanctuary invites you to pause, cuddle, or simply revel in the poetic cascade of luminescent whispers above.

Here, the essence of togetherness, compassion, and tranquility guides us. Let this space be a haven where calm envelops you and the warmth of collective energy permeates your being. Within these walls, the threads of a vast tapestry of cosmic connectedness reveal themselves. Whether you wander alone or with companions, may you uncover a deeper sense of oneness with the universe and the energies around you.

Thank you for being a part of this shared dream. With love and light, Orbit

Ambisphere for Critical NW 2025

These wonderful photos courtesy of Katie Cornejo via the Critical Northwest Facebook group.

Ambisphere User’s Guide

Spoken word tracks

Alan Lightman - I Fell In Love - from A Trip To Infinity - “I fell in love. And that changed everything. That mattered. Even though we might be specks in the cosmos.”

Alan Watts - Awake or Still Dreaming - “I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream… and you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip, say 75 years of subjective time into 8 hours of sleep. You would, I suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life – love affairs, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing, 75 years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you would move over to an adventurous dimension, where there was sudden dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers, and go on dangerous journeys, make wonderful explosions and blow them up. Eventually get into contest with enemies. And after you’ve done that for some time, you’d think up a new wrinkle. To forget that you were dreaming, so you’d think it was all for real, and to be anxious about it. …And they you’d say, well, like children who dare each other on things, how far out could you get? What could you take? What dimension of being lost, of abandonment of your power, what dimension of that could you stand? You could ask yourself this ‘cos you know you’d eventually wake up. And after you’re gone on doing this, you see, for some time, you’d suddenly find yourself sitting around in this room, with all your personal involvements, problems, uh, talking with me. How do you know that’s not what you’re doing? Could be…”

Alan Watts - Growing People - “The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people, and our existence on the Earth is a symptom of this other system, and its balances, as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of a whole company of other galaxies. Goodness only knows what that’s in.”

Alan Watts - Leaf out of a tree - “We all have this feeling that ‘I came into this world’. Well, that isn’t true; you came out of this world, like a leaf comes out of a tree.”

Alan Watts - You are the Function - “…You are a function of this total galaxy, bounded by the Milky Way, and that, furthermore, this galaxy is a function of all other galaxies. And that vast thing that you see far off with telescopes, and you look—one day you’re going to wake up and say, “Why, that’s me!” And in knowing that, know—you see—that you never die, that you are the eternal thing that comes and goes, that appears now as John Jones, now as Mary Smith, now as Betty Brown, and so it goes, for ever, and ever, and ever.”

Ambisphere Radio - Attention Cosmic Travelers 🤖AI Generated Speech - “Attention Cosmic Travelers! Ambisphere requests you keep arms, legs and limiting beliefs inside the ride at all times!”

Ambisphere Radio – All I listen to… 🤖AI Generated Speech - “I don’t listen to the millionaires or the billionaires. All I listen to is Ambisphere Radio. Yep.”

Ambisphere Radio - Enjoy your stay 🤖AI Generated Speech - “You are listening Ambisphere Radio. Enjoy your stay.”

Ambisphere Radio - Remember your 10 principles 🤖AI Generated Speech - “Radio Ambisphere. Live from Critical NW 2025. Remember your ten principles, kids.”

Ambisphere Radio - The Next Stop 🤖AI Generated Speech - “Welcome to Ambisphere. The next stop will be… here.”

Ambisphere Radio - The Time Is… Now 🤖AI Generated Speech - “You are listening to Ambisphere Radio. The time is… now.”

Ambisphere Radio - Until Dawn Nudges 🤖AI Generated Speech - “Tonight’s special bulletin shines upon Ambisphere, a hushed halo tucked amid Critical NW. Within this hidden haven, community garden blooms in radiant pixels that drift like fireflies. Trace the pathway inward and low, slow tones mingle with light swaddling your wandering senses. Stay as long as the night allows, your heartbeat soon syncs to the gentle pulse overhead. Let this quiet transmission guide your orbit through the garden. Until dawn nudges the dial anew.” Ambisphere Radio - With love and light 🤖AI Generated Speech, based on Orbit’s own voice “Enter this realm of light and sound, where serenity and connection await. Ambisphere is a tribute to the moments that remind us of our shared humanity and the profound beauty of presence. Born from a dream of cosmic connection and the soothing dance of music and light, this sanctuary invites you to pause, cuddle, or simply revel in the poetic cascade of luminescent whispers above. Here, the essence of togetherness, compassion, and tranquility guides us. Let this space be a haven where calm envelops you and the warmth of collective energy permeates your being. Within these walls, the threads of a vast tapestry of cosmic connectedness reveal themselves. Whether you wander alone or with companions, may you uncover a deeper sense of oneness with the universe and the energies around you. Thank you for being a part of this shared dream. With love and light, Orbit”

Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner - Start to Finish – from Arrival - Louise Banks: “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?” Ian Donnelly: “Maybe I’d say what I felt more often. I-I don’t know.”

Baz Luhrmann - Sunscreen - “Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ‘99: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.”

Carl Sagan - Bits to Dandelion - “The surface of the Earth is far more beautiful and far more intricate than any lifeless world. Our planet is graced by life, and one quality that sets life apart is its complexity. Slowly evolved through four billion years of natural selection, you can describe in detail how a rock is put together in a single paragraph. But to describe the basic structure of a tree, or a blade of grass, or even a one-celled animal, you’d need many volumes. It takes a great deal of information to make, or even to characterize, a living thing. The measuring rod—the unit of information—is something called the bit. It’s an answer, either yes or no, to one unambiguously phrased question. So to specify whether a light switch is on or off requires only a single bit. To specify something of greater complexity requires more bits. There’s a popular game called 20 Questions, which shows that a great deal can be specified in only 20 bits. For example: I have something in my hand—what is it? Is it alive? Yes—one bit. Is it an animal? Nope—two bits. Is it big enough to see? Yep. Does it grow on the land? Yes. Is it a cultivated plant? Nope. Well, with only five bits, we’ve made some substantial progress to figuring out what it is. With 20 skillfully chosen questions, we could easily whittle all the cosmos down to a dandelion.“

Carl Sagan - Dust In A Sunbeam - “On a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.”

Carl Sagan - No Interest - “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest.”

Carl Sagan - Star Stuff - “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

Carl Sagan - The Cosmos - “The cosmos is all there is. Or ever was. Or ever will be.”

Carl Sagan - We Speak For Earth - “Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth! Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed, not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we sprang. In our tenure on this planet we’ve accumulated dangerous evolutionary baggage, propensities for aggression and ritual, submission to leaders, hostility to outsiders, all of which puts our survival in some doubt. We’ve also acquired compassion for others, love for our children, A desire to learn from history and experience. And a great… soaring… passionate intelligence, the clear tools for our continued survival and prosperity. Which aspects of our nature will prevail, is uncertain. Particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small Planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos, an inescapable perspective awaits. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatic ethnic or religious or national identifications are a little difficult to support when we see our planet as a fragile, blue crescent, fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extra-terrestrial observer?! What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism, and recognizes that an organism at war with itself, is doomed. We are one planet! We are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet, to enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars!”

Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot - “From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. […] Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan - Cosmic Arena - “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”

Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey - 400 Billion - from Contact - Ellie: “You know, there are 400 billion stars out there, just in our Galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those has planets, and one out of a million of those have life, and just one out of a million of those has intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.” Palmer: “Well if there wasn’t, it’d be an awful waste of space.”

Brent Spiner – Missed your humanity – from Star Trek: TNG, season 5, episode 8 - Data: “As you examine your life, do you find you have missed your humanity?”

David Duchovny - Still Dreaming - from Kalifornia - “Sometimes there’s a moment as you’re waking and you become aware of the real world around you, but you’re still dreaming.”

DeForest Kelley - In All The Universe – from Star Trek, season 1 episode 9 - McCoy: “In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million earth-type planets…and in all the universe, three million million galaxies like this one. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us.”

Matthew Broderick - You Could Miss It - from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - Ferris Bueller: “Yep. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.”

Radio Cosmos – from Fifth Element - “You are listening to Radio Cosmos. And it is now 5PM.”

David Attenborough - For All Nature - “I’ve always believed that few people will protect the natural world if they don’t first love and understand it. [instrumental music plays] Darwin revealed that all species have evolved over time to best exploit the conditions in which they live. He further realized that these conditions are not simply those of geography and climate, but also their relationship to other lives that live alongside. From the delicate codependences of bees and orchids, to the dramatic connection between cheetah and gazelle, all life on Earth is both product and contributor to its place in space and time. This complex web of life, of which we are a part, has been millennia in the making. Whilst Darwin’s insights explain how this web came about, over 200 years later, we are still only beginning to understand its interconnections and which of these connections are the most vital. Yet we do know for certain is that these connections can break. As far as we know, there have been five major extinction events on our planet. Events caused by changes so severe that many species simply can’t adapt, and as such die out. Right now, we are in the midst of the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. One every bit as profound and far-reaching as that which wiped out the dinosaurs. It’s almost impossible to grasp as we go about our lives that the rest of life on Earth is experiencing destruction on the scale of that wrought by a colossal asteroid collision. But consider these facts. 96% of the mass of mammals on our planet today are us and the livestock that we’ve domesticated. Only 4% is everything else, from elephants to badgers, tigers to bats. 70% of all birds are now domesticated poultry, mostly chickens. Nature once determined how we survive. Now we determine how nature survives. One of the things Darwin’s work has taught us is that we break nature’s connections at our peril. Yet break them we do at ever-greater speed. The impacts of our growing population and our consumption now directly threaten our own future. Just 30 years ago, most whale species were heading towards extinction. A public outcry led to a global agreement to protect whales, and now most populations are recovering. We’ve subsequently learned how important whales are to the entire ocean system. So saving these majestic creatures actually benefits us as well. [instrumental music plays] The natural world is not just nice to have, it fundamentally matters to each and every one of us. What we did to save the whales, we must now do for all nature.”

Anne Hathaway – Love – from Interstellar - Brand: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”

Patrick Stewart - Now will never come again – from Star Trek: TNG, season 5, episode 25 - Capt. Picard: “Seize the time, Meribor. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”

Molly Parker - Pendulum – from Madeline’s Madeline - Evangeline: “Jung says that, ‘In all chaos, there is a cosmos. In all disorder, a secret order. The pendulum of the mind swings between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.’”

Kate Siegel - It’s Simply A Dream – from Midnight Mass - Erin: “We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time.”

Jon Heder - Pedro, listen to your heart… – from Napoleon Dynamite - Napoleon: “Pedro, just listen to your heart. That’s what I do.”

Jon Heder - Pretty much friends – from Napoleon Dynamite - Napoleon: “So me and you are pretty much friends by now, right?” Pedro: “Yes.”

Keanu Reeves - Still Dreaming – from The Matrix - Neo: “Ever have that feeling where you’re not sure if you’re awake or still dreaming?”

Keanu Reeves – Sure – from The Matrix - Neo: “Sure. I’ll go.”

Laurence Fishburne - Free Your Mind – from The Matrix - Morpheus: “You have to let it all go, Neo. Fear. Doubt. And disbelief. Free your mind.”

Matt Doran - Impulses – from The Matrix - Mouse: “To deny our own impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.”

Rupert Spira - Fall in Love with Being Aware - “All you know is the knowing of your experience. That’s all you ever know, is the knowing of experience. That knowing never disappears. It runs constant throughout all experience. It is not the property of any particular experience. Although it runs through all experiences, it is not limited by any particular experience. Be interested in that. What is that? What is the knowing with which I know my experience? What could be more interesting than that? Fall in love with that.”

Rupert Spira - There Is No Past - “There is no time. Okay. Period. Ha- have you ever been to the past? It’s all thought. Or, or the future? Thought, thought. Past is thought. No, no. You, you, you, you think of the past, but you think of the past now. Have you ever actually been to the place called the past that you think about? No. It’s not possible. Nobody’s ever been there. It’s a belief. It’s just a belief that we all take for granted. Is it your experience that the now is moving along a line of time from the past to the future? Is the now moving, and, and how long does the now last? I don’t think I’ve ever measured it, but- It, it, it doesn’t- Yeah … it doesn’t last. Yeah. The, the now doesn’t last in time. There is no- There’s nothing … time for the now to last in. Right, right. Now is not a moment- Right … sandwiched between these two vast spaces. There are, there is no vast space by the side of the now. The now that is not a moment. The, these, these are new age ideas. They have nothing to do with, with truth or reality. The, the, the… Now is not a moment. Now is eternity. The ever present, not the everlasting. But when that now is filtered through the limitations of the mind, it appears as time. Okay. The mind is like a prism which refracts the now, which has no dimensions, into a single dimension of time.”

Leonard Nimoy - Fascinating - Spock: “Fascinating.”

Wonder – from Suture - “Or we may wonder if we are now still dreaming.”

Yara Shahidi - Carl Sagan Once Said… – from The Sun Is Also a Star - Natasha: “Carl Sagan once said that human beings are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever. Compared to the lifespan of the universe our lives begin and end in a single day.”

Pedro Pascal - We have to open our minds – from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - Javi: “We have to open our minds to the infinite possibilities that the cosmos has to offer.”

Mysteries of the Cosmos – from Track 29 - “Inhabit its surface. Always seeking, always striving to solve the mysteries of the cosmos.”

What is Ambisphere?

Ambisphere is an immersive art installation designed to create a space of calm, connection, and cosmic wonder. It blends ambient light, sound, and comfort to invite participants into a shared experience of tranquility and presence.

Inside Ambisphere, soft LED animations flow like poetry across the space, casting a gentle glow that shifts in harmony with the soothing, atmospheric soundscape. Whether arriving solo or with friends, visitors are welcomed into a setting that encourages introspection, quiet connection, and a sense of belonging—a place where time slows, and the outside world fades.

Rooted in the principles of inclusivity, presence, and artistic expression, Ambisphere is not just an installation; it’s a moment to pause, breathe, and feel part of something greater.

Okay, really: it’s a small tent with a large LED panel inside and it plays ambient music.

Making Ambisphere

Technical specs

  • 863 addressable LEDs (WS2811 ‘bullet’ style & WS2812 5050)
  • custom CNC’d shape to fit the interior of the tent with custom printed caps for the LEDs
  • Ambisphere 2024 uses the Unicorn Supercomputer v1 rendering engine (more on this soon!); Ambisphere 2025 uses the v2 engine (C#, python, TouchDesigner)
  • Custom real-time audio processing and visual creation done in TouchDesigner—no pre-programmed responses to audio (it’s all done in real time!)
  • powered using 4x 12v 100Ah LiFePO4, 1x 24v 200Ah LiFePO4, 1x 24v 100Ah LiFePO4, 1x GoalZero 3000Wh LiIion
  • Custom bridge application to take UDP data from TouchDesigner and send it over serial to ElectroMage PixelBlaze Serial adapters to interface with the WS281* protocol. (Written in C#.)
  • Audio Programming: Custom application (written in Python) to emulate a radio station style audio programming where tracks are randomly picked by their least played (to ensure we don’t hear duplicated until all tracks have plated). Every 7 minutes at the end of a track, an interstitial track is played (like a spoken word track or station ID).