Ardent Heavy Industries

Ardent Heavy Industries is a Bay Area industrial arts collective merging aesthetics and engineering. We have been installing large-scale interactive art worldwide since 2004. Our work is a collaboration of artists, engineers, programmers, designers, scientists, and fabricators. We build beautiful things with light, sound, metal, and code. Our members include experts in electronics and software control systems, audio engineering, compressed gas and process controls, and metal fabrication. We value non-hierarchical artistic collaboration and teaching. We work out of American Steel Studios, a wonderful community of artists in West Oakland, California. Our best-known works are Syzygryd (a 2.5 ton collaborative musical instrument and sculptural visualizer), the Ardent Mobile Cloud Platform (a glowing pixelated cloud that will rain on your parade), and Straightedge (a 2.6 mile long ruler that lets you see the curvature of the Earth). Our sister organization, Interpretive Arson, is responsible for 2pr (a blisteringly interactive large-scale fire toy), and Dance Dance Immolation (holder of the Guinness World Record for "World's Hottest Videogame", retired in 2013).