EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: CRAIG TOZZI, ANALOG ART

Craig Tozzi, CEO/director at New York design/production company 2000strong, is a man of many extracurricular talents. He's a digital illustrator, a musician, a large-format photographer and, for about a year now, a glassblower. What's the attraction of glass? "Everything I do now [in the office] has an Undo button, and you're always getting instantaneous results," he explains. "It creates a lack of patience. Glasswork is the complete opposite of that. Glassblowing is an extremely analog activity, and that's exactly why I got involved with it. It takes a long time to learn, and once you screw something up or make a change in the glass, there's no going back. You try to make the best out of what you have."

He did his learning at a huge facility called Urban Glass, near his home in Brooklyn, where he took courses and watched the artists at work. He's since made vases, bowls, glasses and neon pieces, such as the one seen here, which has been adapted as the 2000strong official background art, seen on the company's reels and promotional mailings. It's not lit because it's unfinished. Tozzi, 30, describes the untitled piece simply as "neon tubulation. The four pluses are the logo of the company, so I wanted to make the logo in neon. But it was never turned into a functional piece."

Tozzi has given his glasswork to friends as gifts, and he's toying with the idea of making custom lamps. "Once you learn the basics, you're capable of doing any form you like," he says. "It's just a matter of how complicated you want to get." Yet no matter how complex a piece becomes, glassblowing remains fundamentally simple. "It's nothing more than heat, gravity and time," says