I’m H. Cole Wiley — an artist, engineer, and founder based in New Orleans.
I’ve always been drawn to the places where systems overlap — where hardware meets code, where sculpture becomes interface, where an idea becomes a thing you can touch, test, or debug.
I build systems that test ideas fast, often by welding them, coding them, or both. Whether it’s a sculpture, a prototype, or a line of code, I’m always working at the edge of what something could be — and how we might know when it’s worth continuing. Some things hold up. Others fall apart. That’s the work.
I’ve been working at the intersection of art and code for over 20 years. My background is in sculpture, computer science, and digital art — a combo that’s shaped how I approach everything from AI software to generative installations. Sometimes I’m writing C++ for machine vision. Sometimes I’m welding steel or prototyping a new interface that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
Crescent Wrench Studio is where all that comes together. It’s a lab for weird, early ideas — a place for experimentation, invention, and building things that maybe shouldn’t exist.
If it’s messy, unproven, or has the potential to break something useful — I’m probably interested.
This studio runs on art, code, and fire.
I didn’t come to creative tech through a bootcamp or a startup accelerator — I found it in a high school welding booth and a blank Java window.
Between 2004 and 2008, I was teaching myself how to make things move, break, light up, and react — sculptural forms on one side, basic software on the other. The two disciplines were never meant to stay separate.
By 2010, I was deep in both: studying sculpture and computer science at LSU, showing digital installations across the South, and co-founding my first startup, Kinobi.
We were trying to solve a simple but hard problem: If you’re learning a physical skill — like dancing, yoga, or martial arts — how do you know if you’re doing it right?
Kinobi used the Microsoft Kinect to track your movements while you followed a video, giving you real-time feedback when something was off. It was an early experiment in embodied computing, gesture recognition, and adaptive learning.
In 2012, I had my first solo museum show — Riverless Walk — at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. I was hooked on the feedback loop between invention and expression.
Those years, 2010–2015, were about learning how to weld systems together — physically, digitally, and professionally.
From 2015 to 2020, I went all-in on startup life. As co-founder and CTO of Scandy, I built a full-stack 3D scanning platform that ran entirely on mobile GPUs. We wrote low-level kernels, shipped real-time mesh viewers, trained custom ML models, and filed two patents — all while collaborating with companies like Google, Intel, and Sony.
I learned how to build a team, scale a product, and design tools that made complex technology accessible. But my art practice went quiet. I’d traded expression for execution.
In 2022, I made the decision to restart that part of myself — enrolling in an MFA at Tulane to reawaken the artistic thread I’d put on hold.
This time, the code came with me. I leaned into AI as an amplifier — of memory, of embodiment, of the kinds of questions I wanted my work to ask. It was less about tools and more about attention: how technology shapes what we notice, remember, and discard.
Now, through Crescent Wrench Studio, I move freely again between software, sculpture, and systems thinking. It’s a one-person lab where I test ideas by making them — with sparks, scripts, and everything in between.