We recently connected with Joseph O’Connell and have shared our conversation below.

Joseph, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Being a business owner can be really hard sometimes. It’s rewarding, but most business owners we’ve spoken sometimes think about what it would have been like to have had a regular job instead. Have you ever wondered that yourself? Maybe you can talk to us about a time when you felt this way?

I love making art, having a family, and being out in public. It’s thrilling that I’ve been able to turn that into a career making large scale art for public spaces. Even while our son was young and I was spending a lot of time sitting next to jumping castles,
going to the zoo, pushing him on the swing, etc. I was always thinking and talking to other parents about what they liked about the experience and what public spaces could become to better support families. They say a good designer or artist watches other
artists, but a great artist watches everything. I try to keep my eyes open and get ideas from whatever context I’m in. I remember one weekend morning I was sketching the idea for our Wet Wheel sculpture that is a mini-splash-park for cyclists and my young
son looked at the sketches and gave me ideas. Sometimes we’ll all be watching a family movie together in our living room and I’ll be making a scale model of a new artpiece on the coffee table and my family will give me feedback. It is great to be able to combine
my passions. I also enjoy paragliding and spent some time in rural Colombia a few years ago. Sometimes I’d land and watch the clever ways that rural kids found to play with metal hoops, bars, and ropes – just whatever they had lying around their farms. This
gave me the idea for some sculptures we are currently developing for very high end locations in the US. It’s gotten to the point where if I enjoy something or get interested in it, I suspect that therein lie the seeds for something that the public at large
might enjoy. As a business owner, it is essential to bring in these new ideas and be open to inspiration on a daily basis. If I didn’t own the business and direct the creative development I don’t know if I’d have a chance to express all these ideas I get.

Joseph, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am the founder of Creative Machines and its artistic director. Over 27 years I have developed a gender- and race-diverse staff of 30 designers, engineers, architects, fabricators and project managers – all united by a shared vision of creativity, enthusiasm
and respect. We own an amazing 8-acre facility rooted in a unique community and we create permanent art that is loved all over the world. Couples have gotten married at our Bike Church, Texas Rising and Chinook Arc. Schools have adopted our sculpture, Toby,
as their mascot. Ballroom Luminoso and Bike Church have drawn such crowds that parks have been built around them. We have created approximately 50 public art projects and many of these have won “Best Of…” designations.

Creative Machines began when I rented my first workspace from Thomas Edison’s former shop foreman, Azell Prince, then in his 90’s. We set up a hammock for him in my shop which led to an unforgettable year of conversations before he died. He recorded a series of interviews with the National Archives on Edison’s management process and he would rehearse his memories in long conversations with me. Azell’s lessons on managing a creative workforce influence my company to this day. The image that remains in my mind was Edison putting together work teams like 3D jigsaw puzzles: a theoretical person, a practical machinist, a marketing person, and a good manager. He had a genius for putting together teams and motivating them that influences me to this day.

My company and I have created permanent sculptures that react to people’s touch, their heartbeat, their waving hands, their shadows, and videos on their cellphones. But our understanding of interactivity goes much deeper than technology. It encompasses careful analysis of sight lines, placing sculptures where people can influence them, creating shapes that invite exploration and forms that encourage people to interact with each other. We offer room for people to bring their own meaning to each art piece in significant ways. Light and motion are the connective threads that run through our work. We believe in light’s emotive power and its ability to enliven a space and our sculptures remind people that they still have bodies in a world of screens. We have pioneered the use of acrylic in outdoor sculptures and lately we have been designing some of the world’s largest kinetic works.

We have one of the largest artist-led facilities in the world for art production, a full range of manual and CNC equipment, assembly spaces with clear spans over fifty feet high and five bridge cranes capable of manipulating huge art pieces and loading them
onto flatbeds. Most of our projects are in the $250K to $1M range and completed within 6-9 months. We have installed successful permanent projects on six continents and won prizes in every field we’ve entered.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

I didn’t know it at the time, but when I started the company in 1995 and came up with our mission statement two years later I was orienting our work to the Experience Economy. Our mission statement from 1997 has scarcely changed in 27 years:

We create objects and environments that encourage creativity, support social interaction, and inspire self-confidence.

It seems so ordinary now, but the term Experience Economy wasn’t used publicly until 1998. Most companies who operated in a similar market as Creative Machines defined themselves by their market – ie. “we strive to be the best museum exhibit firm we can be.” Right from the start, I felt that the fields of museum exhibits, public art, event activation, and others were fluid names all circling around the idea of creating amazing public experiences that touched people on a powerful level inside their own hearts and
minds. I wanted my company to be oriented towards creating those empowering experiences rather than being defined by a particular market that would probably change every few years.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice.

It is hard not to have deeply divided views about NFTs. The cynic in me hears the hype about the democratization of art production and wants to believe in that, but the reality that appears to be playing out is all about the fetishization of exclusivity rather
than anything democratic. The cynic in me also hears ‘the future of art is digital’ but when I look at a lot of the digital art that is attached to NFTs all I see are second-rate GIFs that are produced in a single-creator, gallery-upselling, artificial-scarcity
model that just echoes the tired model that has characterized the art market over the past 50 years or so. What about the potential for collaborative creation, direct selling, and radical transparency that the fundamental principles of NFTs allow?

So much for the cynic in me. The optimist in me is excited about a few potential avenues for NFTs in the work my company creates: One of those is the ability to involve outside groups in the idea generating phase of our work, create spin-off NFTs from this
work, and then have revenue from both the initial sale and any re-sale of those NFTs go back to the groups that helped us develop concepts. We do a lot of community engagement when we develop our public pieces, and we try not to be extractive. We run events
that are fun, collaborative, and people generally feel that they have gotten more than they’ve given when they attend these events. But wouldn’t it be cool if we could create NFTs that would continue to send revenue back to those communities?

Another opportunity we are looking into is using NFTs to transform private ownership into public good by selling NFT’s attached to unique programming that drives some of our permanent pieces in public view. In concrete terms, this is most likely to become real
when we install a long-anticipated public artwork in Atlanta. This artpiece has a civil rights theme and it is interactive. People pushing giant arcs of steel together from across Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd activate the lighting that fills the artwork. Group
action triggers special light shows. I could easily see us selling NFTs to individuals or corporations that want to fund the development of unique light show code that could be triggered on special events. This is something we are talking with several partners and hope to implement within the next six months.

Because we are excited by these two ways to use NFT’s to enhance our work for the public, we decided to dip our toes in the water and create a handful of limited-edition NFT’s based on our work. You can find them here, on Rarible:

https://rarible.com/creativemachines/sale

Contact Info:

• Website: creativemachines.com, josephoconnell.art
• Instagram: instagram.com/creativemachines/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/creativemachinesinc/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-oconnell/
• Other: https://rarible.com/creativemachines/sale

Image Credits
Creative Machines