Artist Commissions

Billboard Coyote Installation

Role

Lead Fabricator & Technical Engineer

Client

Lars Bergquist

Year

2023

Discipline

Artist Commissions

For my first project with artist Lars Bergquist, he approached me with an incredibly unique concept: a life-sized painting of a coyote mounted high atop a Los Angeles billboard. The artistic twist—and where my technical engineering came in—was creating an entirely off-grid system that could track approaching pedestrians and trigger field recordings of coyote howls from a speaker hidden behind the painting. To pull this off under harsh outdoor conditions, I built a custom waterproof enclosure paired with a 25-watt solar panel to power the rig sustainably. Late one night, Lars and I scaled the billboard ourselves to mount the coyote and install the system. The core tracking intelligence relied on a Raspberry Pi connected to an IR night-vision camera. I wrote custom software utilizing OpenCV to process the live video feed and detect when a person was walking toward the billboard. If the system detected an approaching pedestrian within our set operational window—active between 8:00 AM and 11:00 PM—it would trigger a 3-minute playback loop. The audio itself was a collection of actual coyote howls that Lars had recorded just a few hundred meters away the previous year. Lars has a deep connection to the city of Los Angeles and all of its inhabitants, especially the local coyote population. This project was profoundly rewarding to execute because it played perfectly into the theme of static objects unexpectedly coming alive. It served as a powerful acoustic reminder that the urban landscape is alive around us in ways we don't always expect, prompting us to notice the auditory signs of wildlife long before we can visually observe them.