Final Warning

Since the early days of the internet, Stephen Hendee has explored the dark interplay between technology and humanity—a theme that grows ever more urgent as we rush toward an uncertain artificial intelligence future.

About the Exhibition

In his new exhibition Final Warning, Stephen Hendee presents small-scale sculptures and works on paper created over several decades. The work explores Hendee’s skeptical view of tech-optimism and ongoing interest in the push-pull between human and machine.

Hendee completed his MFA at Stanford during the birth of Web 1.0 and incipient experiments with virtual reality. Inspired by the low-fi, vector-based language of early video games and virtual worlds, he developed an artistic vernacular drawn from the internet’s base code. His pioneering, light-based polyhedral sculptures created real-world simulations of virtual worlds. Hendee’s practice evolved into large-scale immersive architectural installations that stand alongside Light and Space movement artists James Turrell, Larry Bell, and Robert Irwin.

A longtime art professor and student of new technologies, Hendee’s approach is steeped in art history but draws from digital worlds: machined shapes, vector-based drawings, virtual reality-inspired landscapes, and immersive colors that glow like our screens. A skilled technician inspired by material potential, Hendee employs an array of analog and digital tools ranging from traditional sculptural casting to 3D resin printers, laser cutters, microcontroller-driven LED arrays, and more. The results are never so slick as to erase the human creator.

Final Warning features several of Hendee’s signature vector-based light sculptures with dynamic color arrays. Drawings and prints scale down the immersive environments of his installations into intimate portals into imagined worlds. Laser-cut copper punch cards allude to early mainframe programming and riff off the cryptocraze. Polyhedral set-pieces evoke an alternative science-fiction universe. An alarm bell for our impending climate crisis is both a clarion call and plea to future generations that some among us tried to raise the final warning.

Hendee’s work stands beside seminal science fiction and futurist philosophy, both seducing us with its potential and asking us to confront the complexity and dangers of our digital embrace.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Is there an overarching idea that you’ve explored throughout your career?

Stephen Hendee

A subject that is about technology and civilization, and considering the relationship of humanity to technology at this time. The artistic language isn't direct, it is meant to evoke or create a connection in the mind of the viewer about these relationships.

How does that play out in your current work?

I'm interested in creating artifacts which are about this moment in technology where we appear to be hitting this ceiling, which has to do with climate change and our effect on the environment. I want to create objects that show that there's people who see what the potential is.

Some of these objects are not necessarily intended to be heroic celebratory objects. They're intended to have a pathos to them, or a concern. Some of the objects that I make out of plastic, if they're not directly in light, they'll last for thousands of years, not unlike bronze.

Thinking about early objects in museums, I'm interested in the technological connections that those past societies had for their moment. Ours is having a similar trajectory, and I am interested in making objects that are reflective of that, for this moment.

We’ve been discussing the bell project for more than a year now. There are material and fabrication considerations that have limited your ability to bring your vision to life. Tell us about this piece.

It’s called Warning Bell. The 3D print is a prototype for a full-scale bell, cast in bronze, that rings. The intent is to make public projects for specific communities that endure climate change catastrophes and that those public bells would represent either the loss of people or the loss of resources to that community. It’s a challenging conceptual public project that feels meaningful to me in order for people to become more aware and more accepting of the concept of climate consequences that result from the way in which we use the world.

Bells have been used throughout history for various reasons, either ceremonial or commemorative. And so it's much more in the keeping of the history of bells in that way that they are produced for various reasons for people and communities. The Liberty Bell is an example of a historically popular bell. In Asian cultures, there are ceremonial bells that that are 5,000 years old and made out of bronze. That's one of the inspirations for this was the idea of making a bell that signifies the recognition of climate change, or at least in the most general sense, that the climate is changing because of industrial civilization. And that change will continue to grow.

The intent of the bell was to also leave something made of silicon bronze, which is this durable material that would last for a long time and would mark a date and time, which is signified by the parts per million of gases that are in the atmosphere. The interior of the bell has a series of inscriptions and signifies this moment in time. And one of those inscriptions, besides the physical date, is the parts per million of specific industrial gases that are creating climate change.

The history of sculpture is about finding patrons and finding support for ideas. It's just an expensive process.

For this exhibition you’ve made a print inspired by one of your first large-scale architectural installations, Black Ice, where you were still working out your pioneering, low-fi, polyhedral aesthetic vernacular. Can you speak about what motivated those early pieces?

I wanted to make something that looked like it was from a virtual space. The internet was just beginning at that time. There were so many people that were developing ideas around what the Internet meant to society and how it would possibly help. And I think I had my own opinions that the internet was not going to necessarily be the best idea, as expansive and as helpful as it's been. There's also—I would say, the dark side of the internet. There's something that's anti-social that we see periodically and people kind of can recognize it now. My interest in those spaces was asking a question about whether or not this was a great idea.

The spaces that I was making were also inspired by a history of light art. The Light and Space movement was really important to me. People like James Turrell, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell—people who are using materials to create expansive, experiential spaces that were abstract and devoid of any specific expectation. But my motivations were more about a certain kind of content that was about something occurring right then. It wasn't necessarily about the landscape or architecture. It was about this new space that was being developed by people.

We’re also producing new, limited edition prints of New Hydra and Bloodbath. What are the origins of those works?

The prints are generated from a series of drawings that I made twenty-five years ago with rapidograph ink on museum board. They were massive process drawings that have qualities of maps and the objects that I make on site. The prints are inspired by landscapes, looking at the landscape and human interventions in the landscape. When I fly in a plane, I try to get a window seat so I can take pictures of the environment—it's easy to see human intervention in the landscape.

The New Hydra print is thinking about the industrialization or the industrialized landscape around port cities or inside of port cities. For example, the black areas have this sort of geometric mechanical feature, and the white areas are like the structures that I build. I purposefully decided to try to combine the two. I was imagining what it would be like to make these objects three-dimensional, thinking about the shapes and the contours and the flow of the objects.

Bloodbath is an object that is exploding. It's a destructive process of this object sort of erupting or disintegrating into these shapes. Instead of it being a semi-flat object, the intent was to make something with a more three-dimensional quality.

Can you contextualize the technology of that time to help us understand the moment your work was responding to?

I was witness to some of the first virtual experiments utilizing large goggles and gloves. In class at San Francisco Art Institute, we had people like Sharon Grace who were doing telepresence communication where there were classrooms in other parts of the country that had cameras—she was basically creating early Zoom. We're talking about like the early ‘90s, where the first experimentation with virtual reality was coming into practice. Now it's become so much more ubiquitous.

I was responding to ideas of a virtual world like the film Tron, which was designed by Syd Mead. I was thinking about his connection with modernism and Art Deco and a virtual world that was still very physical and based on this idea of circuitry. Also the idea of these virtual planes, or planes of collision that were created by code, that happened in video games. I was very interested in early video game play, just before it became multiplayer on servers and experiencing social interactions in those spaces.

I also realized there weren't that many artists who were talking about science fiction or the internet, or utilizing aesthetics or ideas directly based in that. Science fiction felt like it was segregated to people who are interested in literature. It didn't feel like a popular subject to talk about or use as a reference in art. And so I felt like it was a space that was worth exploring.

Can you discuss the ongoing series of sculptures where you scale down your architectural-installation language into futuristic modules and vector-based forms?

The process started through the idea of making basic objects in virtual space and then actualizing them through the digital fabrication. I was getting frustrated because I couldn't always find support to make larger-dimension architectural objects. I needed to find another way, so I made smaller objects that were collectible.

The works are an exploration of digital fabrication combined with studio-based material experimentation in plastic manipulation. Many of the initial structures were designed in a solid-modeling 3D program, broken apart virtually in a secondary work flow, and then scaled in a layout process for laser-cutting in cast acrylic through a third digital process. Once the initial real-world assembly of the pieces was completed, the fourth process was an intuitive examination of how the textural aspects of liquid plastics would interact with the hard reflective geometries of the designed object. That took it away from being this completely sterile object.

Many of the results are in keeping with an implied narrative that all things exist within entropy or decay, the proposed permanence of plastics, or the implied promise of a virtual cultural memory.

You started by working with lights, gels, and foam board, but you eventually moved to corrugated polypropylene and LED lights. Can you explain that evolution?

I wanted to continue to evolve the process of making the work. A number of things happened simultaneously. I had to change the material because the foam board was making my lungs sick. But also, with foam board I could only create installation or environmental work in places where it was light tight. When I shifted over to the corrugated polypropylene, I could have my work included in group shows without a light-tight constraint.

The corrugated material also allowed for me to explore a lot of new and different color schemes. It allowed for transmission of light, and I could have multiple different colors in different spaces and create objects that had unique colors by themselves placed very, very close to one another. Now I'm working with programmable LEDs, which means that I can have moving animations of light, color shifts, and gradients occur within the body of the work.

Light has been an important part of your work for a long time. Has your palette evolved?

I don't think about the colors individually as much as I think about how the movement of light through the piece occurs and the design relationships between the colors. I’m less interested in what the colors are, it's really about how the colors relate to one another within the structure that I build and whether or not those moments are dynamic.

So you’re thinking about relational color? Would Josef Albers’s theories apply?

Albers’ color theory is related to a scientific, optical relationship between how colors mix or don't mix. I'm not thinking directly about Albers, but I'm utilizing those understandings about optical color and what is engaging to the viewer. For example, when warm and cool colors meet, there’s an optical movement. So when you shift from a cold palette to a warm palette, the object moves toward the viewer. Painters have utilized this throughout time.

In this case, because there's a movement of color, the LED lighting provides animated movement of light. The viewer has a certain amount of time that they're willing to spend with an artwork. So I think about the speed at which this movement of color is happening, and the amount of time for a color cycle.

You hint at narrative in your titles—Objects for a Lunar Base, Tourist, Damaged Game Mirror, Stinkbug—are these are part of some sort of futuristic civilization?

I could imagine the objects in the background of a science fiction film. There's always these futuristic objects that people care about and think are culturally significant in science fiction films.

What's that science fiction movie in your head that they exist in?

I mean, the fact that anyone has made it to the moon at all to live there is pretty far out. I don't know that it necessarily has a narrative. It clearly has a culture where people care about objects and are interested in objects of the past on some level. It is its own fiction. But it’s intended for viewers to look at it and imagine it for themselves. They exist in order to provoke the audience into wondering what it means. Damaged Game Mirror—that idea is really direct. Anyone who has played a video game and been in an immersive environment where something happens and something gets broken, there's this idea of, well, what does it look like? It looks pixelated and vectorized.

But on some level, the object doesn't succeed until it's been collected. It doesn't really mean anything unless someone has taken it and decided that they're going to care for it. With these objects, I made them so people can collect them. They have a certain visual surface and quality that is similar to my larger-scale work, but it appears to have more preciousness because of how I've handled it.

There's an intent to have a visual appeal that talks to the virtual and the idea that the virtual exists in our space, in our world—in the real world, the virtual exists.

Your envisioning of the future also serves a warning about climate change—as exemplified by your Methane sculpture.

Methane is a 3D representation of the molecular structure of methane, vast quantities of which are locked in permafrost environments. As global temperatures rise these ancient stores of methane will contribute to an amplification in climate change effects. This object is made from a stainless steel framework covered in aluminum HVAC tape, coated in layers of a synthetic aggregate made from paint, carbon granules, silicate pellets, and shredded rubber that I informally refer to as “Death Goo.”

Tell us more about "Death Goo," which you’ve used it in other work for a coralized aesthetic.

It came about from experimenting with materials in my studio and coming up with a synthetic aggregate from paint and recycled materials. I realized that it looked like objects that had been underwater for a really long time, that had been covered in coral or barnacles. It's not very upbeat—it's about the idea that for all the technology we have, nature can just sort of suddenly take it away from us. We're kind of living on the edge of what's possible.

I know that our technological civilization has had a lot of success. It's created a lot of amazing and novel solutions to either making materials or getting people from one place to another or building amazing architecture. But nature itself is so incredibly powerful, it can just sort of minimize all of that really, really quickly. What humans end up doing to the environment may cause an extreme reaction.

The idea is that these materials signify a future where these objects end up underwater. Some people have modeled this idea out and suggested that is going to be the future of this place, a lot of the ice is going to melt. So there are going to be cities and tons and tons of objects that end up underwater and end up being exposed to that water and corroding.

This exhibition includes several small sculptures. One is an edition of copper cards reminiscent of early computer coding cards—can you tell us more about them?

Heavy Punch is a series of laser cut copper cards, which relate to the early paper punch cards that were put into computers' mainframes. Copper as a material is incredibly durable. You see early copper objects from the Copper Age that are still around, even after all these thousands of years.

I like to think about someone holding on to one of those cards—over time it will slowly become polished and have the marks of all the people that handled it, much like a copper penny. I also like the relationship between the card and the shape of cards that we commonly utilize in our wallets. It speaks to a connection between material culture and a virtual culture of currency, and how that relationship is constantly changing. We're in the process of this dramatic change between physical money and digital money.

And the Plateau pieces are also small, laser cut metal objects?

I first made stainless steel objects for a public project. Those were large aluminum shapes that would have light on the top side and appear to be floating between the viewer and the ceiling for a large space. I thought the shapes were really great, so I took the vector material from those designs and then shrunk them down so that they would be suitable for someone to use in their home.

Tell us about the drawings on black paper. Are they imagined worlds? Sketches for large-scale architectural installations you might actualize?

A while back, I broke my clavicle and then snapped a tendon in my arm. My right arm was basically out of commission for over a year. So those drawings were made trying to just get my mobility back. They were just the act of drawing, the act of putting that silver ink on the paper on black paper to experiment with something other than what I'd done before, which was black ink on white paper for many, many years. I wanted to make something that felt like it had an illuminative process or property.

Those geometries are consistent with the process of making things that I've been doing for a really long time. In the black drawings, they could be seen as being three-dimensional surfaces that I could realize as objects or walls. Some of the drawing processes go back to my preparation drawings for making three-dimensional vectorized work in the early nineties. The creative process and rhythms of building those drawings is similar to how I build the objects in space. It really isn't any different from the 2D to the 3D, except for the physical act of, when I'm building a geometric surface, I have to physically measure and cut and glue something together. But the drawing is similar in terms of the creative intent and the process intent.

What was your first experience with a 3D printer, and how have you used that tool in your practice?

I started using 3D printers in an institutional setting. I was responsible for setting up a 3D print lab utilizing those tools to help students learn. I spent probably a year messing around with early 3D printers, figuring out how they work and understanding the properties of G-code and how I might be able to work with that technology to make objects.

There’s a tremendous amount of potential in terms of the scale and materials of a 3D print. I've seen people 3D printing clothing or shoes. I've been experimenting with taking a virtual object I've made, I 3D print it in resin, then I cover the print in production clay and sculpt on top of it. There's an analog surface on top of the virtual 3D substrate. The idea is to re-scan that object and then print that out of wax and then cast that object in a material.

Digital technology has become so fluid between all these different analog and virtual states. You can take something that's virtual, make it actual, then turn it back into virtual, and then reprint it again. What happens to that object is it moves through these states in various relationships of classical manipulation, classical sculpture processes of one thing turning into another and then turning into a permanent object.

There’s a lot of different possibilities with sculptural technology now. That process motivates me to continue to learn and figure out what kinds of objects I want to make, and what they’re about.