The Braking Zone is Eugene’s Premier Sim Racing Studio, with six simulators that feature real racing seats, force-feedback controls, and wrap-around monitors. All the fun and excitement of racing without the dust and expense. Open Wed-Sat 12-8, and Sunday 12-6 for online reservations, walk-ins, and groups.

The Braking Zone proudly supports the Eugene Video Game Developer community (@Bitforest) by showcasing prints from local digital artists. Bitforest members include audio engineers, 3D artists, and pixel artists (and more) who usually work in the digital space. We are proud to dedicate our walls to their physical art. Stop by to see their work and support the local tech community.

Troy Jacobson

Remember Bored Ape? Neither do we. 😄 At the height of the Non-Fungible Token craze, our resident artist Troy Jacobson was commissioned to create a series of NFT robots. We can’t name names — but it turns out Troy made a few extra options along the way. The Braking Zone features an entire wall dedicated to those very NFTs. Come see them for yourself and tell us what you think they are worth!

Raised in the Pacific Northwest and Nigeria, my childhood was anything but the norm. “Craze-balls” is more like it! I first started capturing the life I was seeing as a resident of Lagos, Nigeria in the early 80s. By the mid 80’s I was living in Geneva, Switzerland where I turned my creative focus into photography and skateboarding. Before leaving in 86, I held the title as the #1 street skater in Geneva. I returned to the states only to shift this creative drive into a few other outlets. By the end of high school, I had found myself the lead singer for MADCAP and graduating with an art scholarship.​

Fast forward to 2023 where I have put in 23 years of art, design, and music development for the video game industry and 7 years of fine art and graphic design(Linkedin). I have been a part of so many different creative outlets during this course of my life. From digitizing claymation characters to recording sound effects in the woods, it’s been an amazing “Ride”.

Ryan Rix

Ryan Rix’s work fuses the deterministic, pixel-perfect world of technology and automation with the chance encounters of pen on paper on a rough surface.

Ryan was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ and took to digital creativity from a young age. Pursuing a computer engineering degree lead to his involvement in the HeatSnc Labs hackerspace in Mesa, AZ, where he built interactive robots, 3D printed art, and light installations. In 2012, Ryan moved to Oakland, CA, and bounced around the west coast before settling down in Eugene in 2022. You can find him serving HTML, serving tea, and helping organize Eugene Makerspace.

Starting with a digital image and custom software algorithms, Ryan introduces random chance in to each image to create a unique iteration of a piece, then guides a pen plotter robot to create a physical print. Each work carries the subtle variation of the pen and the surface under the paper to create something one of a kind, an imperfect physical manifestation of a moment in time.

ernfst

An Ohioan who drifted into the Pacific Northwest, ernfst is a self-taught artist and animator whose work spans abstract digital manipulations, clay sculpture, and 3D sculpture, with a style that leans toward the grotesque. They later built on that foundation through formal training in advanced digital art tools and software.