Mood Tubes began with an image that had been lodged in my brain since 2004: a human body with a retro TV for a head. I saw it in a Prefuse 73 clip and years later, while building my Blender skills, I returned to that idea with a twist.
The models are faceless. Plastic. Barbie-like. Each one poses suggestively, adorned only with a television head displaying a custom pixel-art emoji; a small signal of feeling in an otherwise commodified body.
I created them during the height of the NFT craze, but instead of selling them, I minted and gave them away freely, a quiet rebellion against artificial scarcity.
I still don’t quite know what to make of them. There’s a strange discomfort in how polished they are, how well they “work.” Mood Tubes sits somewhere between critique and complicity; a glossy, glitching loop of performance, objecthood, and mood.