Joshua Borsman

Joshua Borsman is a builder.

Trained in engineering and signal processing and guided by an insatiable curiosity, he works across sculpture, sound, kinetics, painting, and software — making pieces in which a physical system — a pendulum, a telescope, a tide, a routing table — is the score.

A carbon-fibre pendulum, balanced at the edge of falling by a real-time control loop, tracks visitors across the gallery floor. A telescope, tuned to A♭ minor, sounds JWST spectra as slow chords. The International Space Station threads the meridians of latitude sixteen times a day, plucking a string at each crossing. A sculpture of knotted truck innertubes, set on a sidewalk beside a bus stop, listens for the rumble of an arriving bus and stirs only when the city pulls up.

Several of the pieces aggregate at scale: hundreds of satellites woven into a single sphere, three hundred million LIDAR points stitched into a fragile object, a coastline of buoys speaking as one slow voice, the Moon read crater by crater. The pattern is the gathering.

A recent body of work — Seven Layers — turns the same approach on the public internet. Seven pieces, each reading one layer: certificate issuance, the routing table, latency, the noise of being addressable, an hourly vote among volunteers, the unsettled mempool, the resolver. The machinery that quietly carries everything, sounded.

Another recent thread — What We Keep — turns from systems to memory: what a mind holds and loses, and what a community chooses to preserve. Precipitate, the first piece, watches the present crystallise, melt down a column of molten metal, and spill over the edge into oblivion. More will follow.

The means are technical; the subjects are not: gravity, weather, light, orbits, tide, the public protocols of the internet, and human nature itself — slow systems that usually slip past notice, here given a microphone and a stage.

Galleries, gardens, sidewalks, telescopes, browsers, networks. Each one a found instrument.