Zazen Manufacturing Company

The Zazen Manufacturing Company is a project where I document the story of an imaginary brand of Buddhist home appliances. The history may be fiction, but many of the devices are real and fully functional.

About the Zazen Manufacturing Company

For the past several years, I’ve been interested in inventing, constructing, and documenting the peculiar history of the Zazen Manufacturing Company, America’s largest and most successful manufacturer of Buddhist home appliances.
Koan-O-Scope

In the early 1930’s, the small group of monks who comprised the Zazen Manufacturing Company decided to move beyond their core business of meditation bells. The result was the Koan-O-Scope, a device which — like the kinetoscope — contained short reels of film which the viewer could advance at their own speed.
Interconnector Model 1

In the early 1970s, Zazen began work on their most ambitious product yet: the Interconnector Model 1. But a fire at the factory put the project, and Zazen, in jeopardy.
Interconnector Model 2

Following the destruction of the Interconnector Model 1, work immediately began on an improved model, the Interconnector 2. Restarting from scratch allowed the Zazen engineers to rethink a number of issues that had plagued the first model. Within a year they had perfected a new design that was more reliable, cheaper, with a higher quality…

Projects and experiments

Koan videos

Since 2018 I’ve been making a series of short, meditative videos inspired by trying to be present in whatever space I’m in. There are rules: each video is 30 seconds or less, silent, and square, and must be a sincere expression of the location where the footage was shot.
Palette photos

Inspired by an early fall tree whose leaves seemed to contain every color of the spectrum, I created a set of Photoshop actions to expand and reveal the natural palettes existing in the environments around my house.
Enso animations

A series of short enso animations inspired by comic books and 1970’s Sesame Street cartoons.
Un-portraits

Interesting things happen when we use technology in a way the designers didn’t intend. I enjoy using the iPhone’s portrait mode to take pictures of things other than faces.

Musicals

For the past several years I’ve had the opportunity to work with some very talented people to turn my books into stage musicals.

Backbeard

Backbeard: The Musical, based on my books, tells the tale of Backbeard, the hairiest pirate who ever lived, and his quest to answer the question, “How exactly should a pirate look?”
Benjamin Franklinstein

Benjamin Franklinstein explores the intersection of science and fantasy in the life of Benjamin Franklin, and takes its genesis from an idea that Franklin himself proposed: what would happen if one of the 18th century’s greatest minds preserved himself in suspended animation, then awakened in the 21st century to find a world much different than…