The guitar propped against the wall was built from scratch. Its creator, Phil Taylor, describes it as a robot guitar–there’s an LCD screen in the upper right corner of the body, a knob that functions like a joystick at its base, and tiny hammers on the bridge that hit the strings, with an internal computer that controls the whole thing. Think player piano with different technology. “It works, it totally works,” he says. But he refuses to turn it on, claiming it’ll be too noisy. “I just can’t,” he says. “I’ll call you when I play it out in public. I’m just not into playing it right now.”
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With his shaggy short hair, corduroys, and a black, hole-specked sweater worn over two rumpled shirts, the 30-year-old Taylor hardly fits the image of the nerdy engineer. He lives in a warehouse space filled with workbenches and cubbyholes packed with tiny electrical parts, and dominated on one end by a full machine shop. The only signs of domesticity are two friendly dogs, a tiny kitchen nook made cozy by potted plants, and a black leather sofa contributed by Taylor’s wife, who’s around infrequently these days because she teaches archaeology at the University of Washington. There’s a tall steel tank Taylor bought from a scrap yard and retrofitted to vacuum-suck bubbles out of hardening plastic; it can also be used as a pressurizing device, like a giant pressure cooker. “You don’t want it to blow up,” he says. The electronics bench seems safer: there are small circuit boards in various stages of completion, an Eminem CD, a scribbled-on “Engineer’s Computation Pad,” and a big white eraser. Taylor says the eraser is key: “I get the ten-packs.”
As a teenager Taylor, who grew up in San Antonio, entertained himself by outfitting plastic geese with electronics, then sailing them alongside model boats at his grandparents’ lake house in northern Michigan. A few years later he started to design rock-climbing equipment, and when he enrolled at Princeton on scholarship in 1993 he was on track to become a mechanical engineer. But at the end of his second year he got kicked out for failing classes in the two subjects that came most naturally to him: computer programming and electronics. It wasn’t that they were hard, he says, it was that he was young and lazy. “It’s good,” he says, “because I’m glad I’m not a professional engineer. I got weeded out for reasons that could’ve gotten to me later.”
Before the opening of the MASS MoCA show, Taylor asked Jeremijenko that he be credited as an artist. He’s requested the same of other artists he’s worked with in the last several years, having often seen engineer friends contribute extensively to a project’s final look and feel without credit. In the case of For the Birds, Taylor says the perch’s concept design is the product of many brainstorming sessions between himself and Jeremijenko, but the look and mechanics are all his.
