A personal world-building experiment at Texas Eclipse Festival, bringing immersive art, music, games, and a team of nearly a hundred people together. I wanted visitors to feel overwhelming wonder: to see something unfamiliar, have their curiosity sparked, and want to take part.
Context
Scale
Operations
Role
Focus Areas
Invisible Intersection was a first experiment in building a world people could step into and help create. It brought artists, engineers, performers, and curious visitors into a shared space where their different interests could meet.
The activation sat within Texas Eclipse Festival, with 20,000+ attendees in proximity and operations supported by 35 paid staff and 65 volunteers. The environment integrated with artists including Zeds Dead, Barclay Crenshaw, MIA (Equanimous), and Big Gigantic.
It was also a chance to learn by doing. Building and running the space together showed us what helped people contribute, what needed more support, and how much care sits underneath an experience of this scale.
The arrival was meant to spark curiosity immediately: a glowing, iridescent art car, Funktion-One sound, five fire-shooting geodomes, projection-mapped domes, games, and artists. The scale and sensory richness were intentional. I wanted people to encounter things they had never seen before and feel drawn to explore.
Games, quests, and a shared narrative gave people ways to take part. What made the pieces cohere was giving the team room to bring their own passions and talents forward, with tools, a platform, and facilitation that made contributing as easy as possible.
My role was to help create the conditions for everyone to share their magic. The world came from the people who brought their ideas, skills, and care to it, and from giving those contributions a place to connect.
The long-term mission space targets four interconnected domains: STEM education, decentralization, self-reliance, and magic. Not magic as mysticism, but as experiential literacy, the capacity for wonder, mythic meaning-making, and the recognition that some phenomena exceed immediate explanation while remaining accessible to exploration.
The system created conditions where scientific thinking and poetic imagination could coexist. Where technical skills could be learned through play. Where decentralized learning protocols enabled knowledge transfer without centralized authority. Where self-reliance emerged not from isolation, but from collaboration within distributed networks.
This is the transformative nexus: where the engineer and the poet find common ground, where the scientist and the mystic discover shared language, where the entrepreneur and the philosopher build together. The prototype proved that these domains are not separate. They are different expressions of the same human capacity for curiosity, wonder, and mutual respect.
I worked across creative direction, production, narrative design, and technology. That meant holding the overall vision while helping a large team bring their own work into it, connecting the physical environment, the games, the software, and the practical needs of running the space.
The architecture included custom software systems for participant tracking, quest management, and collective intelligence aggregation. It integrated with festival infrastructure while maintaining autonomous operational protocols. It created interfaces between physical space, digital systems, and human behavior, enabling emergent patterns that could not be pre-scripted.
Designed systems that enabled player-driven discovery and emergent collaboration. The architecture created conditions where participants could become co-creators, where exploration was rewarded, and where collective intelligence could aggregate organically.
Built coherent world-building frameworks that provided structure without constraining possibility. The narrative design created a shared language and common ground where diverse participants could find meaning and connection.
Architected systems for managing 100-person teams across multiple operational domains. Created protocols for volunteer coordination, staff management, and real-time decision-making at festival scale.
Developed custom software systems for participant tracking, quest management, and collective intelligence aggregation. Integrated with festival infrastructure while maintaining autonomous operational protocols.
Enabled real-time aggregation of participant interactions, creating feedback loops that informed system evolution. The architecture transformed individual encounters into collective learning opportunities.
Created frameworks for knowledge transfer without centralized authority. The system enabled peer-to-peer learning, skill sharing, and expertise cross-pollination across diverse domains.
Operating within Texas Eclipse Festival required integration with existing infrastructure while maintaining autonomous operational protocols. The system needed to function as both independent activation and seamless festival component, creating a transformative nexus that enhanced rather than competed with the larger event environment.
Managing 35 paid staff and 65 volunteers across multiple operational domains required clear protocols, distributed decision-making, and real-time coordination. The architecture enabled teams to operate independently while maintaining coherence with the larger system. Every team member became both operator and participant, experiencing the system from multiple perspectives.
The integration with notable artists including Zeds Dead, Barclay Crenshaw, MIA (Equanimous), and Big Gigantic created opportunities for cross-pollination between music, technology, and participatory experience. The system operated in proximity to major stages while maintaining its own world logic, proving that immersive activation could coexist with large-scale festival production.
Nearly a hundred of us were involved, working in a remote location. Getting people and equipment there, keeping water available, feeding everyone, and looking after the team took time and significant resources before the beautiful experiences could emerge.
I chose to run a full kitchen and brought in a phenomenal chef named Mitch. Before we could create wonder for anyone else, we needed to make sure our own team was cared for. Once the kitchen was set up, Mitch kept amazing food available throughout the experience. I remember seeing him working hard, wiping sweat from his brow, and steadily getting it done.
Knowing the team was fed and had what they needed gave the experience room to breathe. Food became the steady thing I didn't have to worry about much, and that freed me to hold the rest of the moving pieces together.
Volunteers also set themselves an ambitious goal: to cook 100,000 tacos to give away at the festival. That was an aspiration, and it reflected the generosity people brought to the project.
The prototype revealed friction points, operational challenges, and design opportunities. These were not failures. They were data. Each imperfection illuminated a constraint, each challenge revealed a design opportunity, each friction point suggested a more elegant solution.
The system learned in real-time. Participant behavior revealed patterns that could not be predicted. Operational challenges exposed infrastructure gaps. Design decisions that seemed sound in theory required adjustment under load. This is R&D at scale: proof-of-concept that generates intelligence for the next iteration.
The prototype generated strategic intelligence: understanding of participant behavior, operational requirements, technical constraints, and design opportunities. This knowledge informs the evolved version, a system that retains the core vision while eliminating friction, optimizing operations, and expanding capabilities.
Invisible Intersection gave me a starting point for future work that brings people together through curiosity, play, and shared creation. I want to carry forward the room it made for different talents, while making the practical side easier for the people who build and run it.
The interests behind it are still connected for me: learning through experience, sharing skills, building self-reliance together, and making space for wonder.
The experience also reminded me that an ambitious creative vision depends on ordinary things done with care: food, water, equipment, communication, and people looking after one another.
The festival was canceled before the eclipse. We were packing up our stage, and as the eclipse approached there was a strange energy in the air. Gradually, a small group of us gathered on top of the art car, about ten or twelve people. We lay down, put on music, and watched the eclipse together.
After all the building, coordinating, and packing up, we still got to share that moment. It was an amazing experience, and it's the memory I keep coming back to.