Seth Kinmont is going from zero to a million dollars using only an algorithm he developed and his own artwork. He started with nothing but an idea for a distiller kit that turns wine into an eau de vie (or a digestif) while you're eating your dinner. By selling two of those kits, he had the seed money to start his investing.

The story of his journey from zero to a million will be the subject of a big museum exhibition in New York in the next couple of years. But there are other shows, featuring other parts of the project, in the meantime—and one is at Bellevue's Open Satellite, where Kinmont is working to hand-build three wooden electric cars (actual) over the next several weeks. (Other parts of the project: clocks with multiple faces moving at various speeds, a new type of harpsichord whose octaves change timbres as you go up and down in pitch, and a scented fireworks kit.)

Kinmont's central interest is in "state change" (a change from one state to another), and everything he makes is related to it. His most completed electric car, sitting in the middle of Open Satellite's gallery, is a cross between a 19th-century touring coach and a hearse, ready to carry you from one place to another, or from one life to the next. (It's pictured on the street in NY, where it was tested out a few months ago. Open Satellite director Abigail Guay is working to get a right-of-way permit so Kinmont can take the car out in Bellevue, too.)

Kinmont, who studied neurology and studio art (at UC Santa Cruz, followed by a short stint as an MFA drawing student at Yale), is a native of Bishop, California, where his family is on its fourth generation of engineers and ranchers. His grandfather had the patent on the disc brake.

Kinmont will be at Open Satellite, where you can see him building and chat with him, through July 3; he's giving a talk at the Henry on Thursday night at 7. I wouldn't miss it.