DRKHRT

DRKHRT: The Duality of Love is a 20-foot steel sculpture that combines fire and light, which debuted at The Love Burn in Miami in 2025.

The project is a collaboration with Matt Bajor. He designed and fabricated the sculpture, as well as the propane flame effects. I brought the light.

That is the short version. It was a crew build, and I was in it from the truck onward across multiple deployments: rigging structure, running systems, and apprenticing under Matt on the safety and operation of the flame effects. I learned NFPA 160, the standard that governs flame in front of an audience, on site rather than in a classroom.

Working from his 3D mockups, I built the projected visuals around the theme he had set, the dual nature of love and its capacity for both euphoria and anguish, and made them audio-reactive so they moved with the sound instead of running a static loop. The hard problem was brightness. Projection loses to open flame, so we converged three projectors on the same surfaces to get enough output to hold up next to the fire. The workflow ran on Resolume Arena and Wire, HeavyM, and TouchOSC, which meant the visuals could be driven live rather than played back.

It keeps getting funded. An honorarium placement at Lakes of Fire in Michigan in its first year out, an art grant that sent a smaller version to Granite Burn, and return grants from both Lakes of Fire and Love Burn for 2026.