Leo Music

Vassar class of 2026
Media Studies, Computer Science, and Studio Art

Software, hardware, and sculptural work, below

Selected work 2025 — 2026
02
Discipline
Hardware
Course
Autonomous Robotics Competition

Autonomous Sorting Robot

An Arduino-based robot that autonomously finds, captures, and sorts subjects into their correct rooms. Worked in a team of four over 14 weeks.

Finished in second place of the competition.

Team B robot
See documentation
Documentation
video of the robot in action · process notes

The task: design and build a robot that can autonomously find, capture, and transport subjects to their correct rooms without touching the controls. Our robot used an Arduino MEGA, a Pixy2 camera for visual detection, a 3D-printed chassis, and a LEGO Technic claw arm.

My primary contributions were communicating between the codebase and the non-technical teammates and structuring the state machine.

Early robot build CAD chassis Pixy2 camera detecting subjects
Week 1
Formed the team, assessed our parts. Plan: four-wheel chassis, 3D-printed body, start simple and refine toward each milestone. Got a motor spinning on the Arduino on the first day.
Week 2
Completed Milestone 1: robot moves on a button press. Mapped out the full sensor array — Pixy2 front-center for visual detection, two ultrasonic sensors for wall-following and side detection, a Sharp GP2D05 inside the catcher to register when a subject was captured.
Week 4
Pixy2 camera fully integrated. Two modes: idle scanning and active fixation. Once the robot detects a target with enough persistence across frames, it locks on and tracks using the object's x-coordinate with a 10-pixel deadzone. If a target disappears for three consecutive frames, it returns to idle and stops chasing hallucinations.
Camera and sensor mount designs
Week 5
Fixed turning. The robot was overshooting because turn speed was constant. Introduced proportional error correction: the closer the target is to center, the slower the turn. Nick suggested the map() function and it fixed everything instantly. Also calibrated exact stop values per motor so the robot could stop without detaching servos.
Week 7
New chassis with everything integrated. Added a dedicated collection slot at the front so subjects always land in a predictable spot.
V2 chassis CAD
Week 9
Claw fully functional. LEGO base mounts it precisely where subjects land in the catcher. The arm was slamming down, so we slowed it with an incremental loop — small delay between each step. Claw, arm raise/lower, and gripper open/close all synchronized.
Claw arm working
Week 12
Switched to the final chassis after a troubleshooting marathon. Previous ultrasonic sensors needed 6.2V but the system was putting out 5V — explaining weeks of noisy readings. Switched to Sharp IR sensors. Klaus redesigned the claw arm to be less flimsy and better aligned.
Week 14
Switched from camera-based catcher detection to a physical button — the camera couldn't reliably tell when a subject was captured. Upgraded to Arduino MEGA for more sensor pins. Added sandpaper to the wheels for traction. Finished second in the competition.
03
Discipline
Sculpture
Course
Visual Ethnography

Carved Wooden Stamp and Embossed Print

A stamp and embossed print for a visual ethnography class, exploring how materials transform information.

Embossing
See documentation
Documentation
artist statement · process photos

Plywood is not a homogenous material, it's a mixture of air, glue, and wood. Thin veneers are pressed together in alternating grain direction. The veneers are thin sheets shaved off a rotating log. The process transforms concentric growth rings into two-dimensional patterns across the boards' surface. Growth rings are a record of seasonal change: the denser, darker wood is where growth was slowest.

My thesis argued that there is no perfect mediation, all communication is lossy. All we can do is see where the loss occurred and consider how it structures the messages we send. I wanted to make a sculpture committed to that idea.

The piece is a stamp, made of plywood, and a mounted embossed print. I glued blocks of wood to a baseboard, carved craters into the surface, and pressed it on wetted semi-transparent paper. The paper picked up color from the wood, compressed in places, tore where pressure exceeded its strength. The grain from the stamp was not transferred, but in its place, the grain from the plywood board it is mounted on shines through the paper.

Embossing
Embossing
Embossing
Embossing
04
Discipline
Sculpture
Year
2026

Sculpture II, Spring '26

Four studio projects exploring what objects do when they stop working the way they're supposed to.

Sculpture
See documentation
Documentation
four projects: speakers · benches · blocks · exquisite corpse

The work I made for this class kept returning to the same few questions: what does an object do when it can't do its job? What are the rules that allow people to exist in the same space? What can we learn from the difference between what I intended and what a viewer can actually see?

Project 1
speakers
Two plywood speakers that don't play music. The interest was in what speakers do besides that: they gather people, they give a room a focus, they mark a space as one where sound might happen. In crit, people asked where the sound was coming from. Someone did the 4'33" reframing. I keep coming back to the idea of "objects of copresence," things that define being-together, that have less to do with their function anymore than with the agreement they represent.
Plywood speakers
Plywood speakers installed
Project 2
benches
Proposal for benches made from reclaimed scaffolding. I was trying to rethink the monument, whether it could work for the everyday rather than the commemorative. The benches ended up reading like they were made for unhoused people. The proportions resembled beds, the two-layer structure provided shelter. I was drawing on was the Judd daybed, which doesn't exactly tell you how to use it.
Reclaimed scaffolding benches
Project 3
blocks
Wooden blocks with cutouts for each other. Originally this was going to be more like yarn bombing, shaped to fit exactly around trees or parking signs or the poles on a bridge near the studio. The final version looked like WWI barbed wire to some people in the room. Completely unintended.
Wooden blocks with cutouts
Wooden blocks installed
Project 4
exquisite corpse
A collaboration with Pearl. We made separate parts in different areas of the studio, not seeing what the other was doing, then connected them with a shared joint system we'd designed together beforehand. The piece ended up being less about the contrast between our two halves than about the connection system. The jig we made to drill identical holes, the rules we wrote before we started. It was fun that it wasn't easy to guess who made which side. We talked about this in terms of writing: your viewer can't have a copy of your brain, so you have to decide what information is actually required for what you want the work to do.
Exquisite corpse collaboration