My work on Cinder caught the attention of The Mill in NYC. My girlfriend and I packed what we needed, stored the rest, and flew with our cats out to NYC. After a stint in corporate housing, we landed in an old tenement building in Brooklyn Heights, a block from the East River.

Surprisingly, The Mill shut down the interactive arm they had hired me to work at just a couple of months earlier. Fortunately, this lead to a wonderful series of freelance projects, professional relationships, and friendships.

My first post-Mill project was a massive, interactive wall at the Euro Championships in Warsaw for Nike by way of Radical Media and Wieden+Kennedy, followed by more Nike work at R/GA for NIKEiD. Then a piece for the Google IO conference via Instrument. My last contract gig in NYC was at Google Creative Lab working on internal ideation.

My favorite project in NYC was with Breakfast, helping them create their first-ever flip-disc display. There was nothing like it. It defied the stated capabilities of even the hardware manufacturer. We had three weeks to go from nothing to 44,000+ flip-discs working in unison at real time display rates. When we went to install it, we discovered that the glass in front of it completely blocked the mesmerizing sound of the discs flipping. We had to develop a system for accurately simulating the audio, spatialized, through glass-mounted speakers in the three days leading up to its debut. And we pulled it off.

My then-girlfriend and I lived like monks in NYC. We took the free ferry to Governor's Island on weekends, ate in, paid $1 to visit the Met, and limited our nights out. We knew the city wasn't for us long-term. We wanted land, a house, goats, chickens, and the mountains, trees, and clean water of Oregon. We saved money for our eventual return. Towards the end our time in NYC, I proposed and she said yes. We moved back to Oregon to start the next chapter of our lives.