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1972 The Science Fiction of Apollo 13 | Audio Cassette
Having found an old watch and pressing it against Dad's Lafeyette cassette recorder microphone, and enjoying the result, a 9 year-old me recorded a radio drama about Apollo 13. (Spoiler: They were rescued by Apollo 12.) |
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1983 Ankh | Or, 64 Rooms: An Adventure in the Metareal World
6502 Assembly Code An early "art" game. Had some game/survival elements, but was primarily a vehicle to visually convey ideas about assembly, interaction, and games-within-games. An excerpt from fan mail much later: My friend and I soon realized that Ankh consisted of many independent automatons. Playing Ankh was similar to programming: by piecing together simple independent things, one could create a chain of events that would lead to a desired result. The next time one played, one might think up a more efficient way to achieve the same result. It was a wonderful puzzle world, richly layered, eloquently executed.Also developed a pretty far-out font for it. |
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1984 Synthestra | A commercial product, a novel Apple // MIDI performance software, in which individual keystrokes could trigger cascading, nested subsequences of notes. |
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1991 First CG QuickTime Movie | Yes... in fact the first pure computer graphic movie ever played on QuickTime. I was one of the original engineers on QuickTime, and this was a test image for it, sound and audio completely rendered by some hand-coded C code. (The graphics were Skia, another project I worked on at Apple.) |
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2001 Floorpuller | My friends Salguod and Zap (Douglas Jones and Lawrence Doan) created a short silent 8mm film in 1995. In 2001, with Protools I created extensive hand-crafted foley
sound effects for it, and superimposed a sonic "plot" of sorts contrived from numerous short musical borrowings.
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2003 Sunrise Station |  | A Burning Man art installation. Plywood, electronics. At a remote location, a subway station absurdly greets you. As you duck into the [plywood] interior, it might appear from a distance that you are descending. Within are
the recorded cozy sounds of trains and conversation.
Includes audio from several contributors including Synthia Payne. |
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2004 Sunrise Moonbase |  | A Burning Man art installation. Plywood, electronics. How sad that nobody has been on the moon
in many decades. Another intimate space, Sunrise Moonbase resembles a sterile Lunar Excursion Module
on the outside, and houses examples of life -- petri dishes, little animals, erotic astronaut drawings -- inside. An hypnotic soundtrack (mixed almost entirely from slowed down Apollo audio
recordings) encourages you to stay as long as you like.
A polaroid snapshot hung over the hatchway implores, as you leave, "But what have you done lately?"  Experience the Virtual LEM Sunrise Moonbase crew and documentation |
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2008 Knife switch MIDI controller | Hand-coded MIDI Compliant USB Driver, exposes several switches and note-on events.
Knife switches were chosen for a DIY/amateur scientist aesthetic.
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2008 Democracity | A Burning Man art installation. Plaster and electronics. A miniature recreation of the Trylon and Perisphere
from the 1939 World's Fair. A small window on the perisphere reveals a tiny world of blinking lights
and odd sounds. Custom circuit boards.
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2010 Science Tarot Animations | After Effects, Photoshop, hand-coded stamp plug-in effect.
Created as support collateral for the Science Tarot deck. Several cards from the Major Arcana have been decomposed and animated. The cards already each capture some archetypal story; the challenge was to "uncapture" that story from the imagery, and reconstruct the living world it came from. JudgmentDuality of Light Quantum Sea Benzene Dream |
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2012 Forest Fireplace | News footage, iPod, home television. A warming simulated hearth with a dark irony within a bad pun.
on youtube At the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2015 
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2013 Reason Rack Extensions | |
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2013 Sunrise Line |  | A Burning Man art installation. Plywood, found objects, video, electronics.
This piece invites you to enter alone into an intimate space. The interior includes displayed artifacts of the artists' deceased relatives in the first two chambers. The final chamber is suggestive of a hospital room, and the floor-mounted pillow guides you to lie on your back, facing upward. Images move in a tiny portal at the center of a faux cathedral ceiling. A soundtrack derived from a medical beeping sound soothes and lulls you. Surrounded by medical-like equipment, you are gurneyed through interstitial locations. |
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2015 Metareal Feedback |  |
An interactive exhibit or toy. Software, Nintendo game controller, video projector.
A visitor plays with the old-school game pad, and learns to control the abstract imagery projected. It's pretty trippy, with chaotic and fractal elements, and bright colors, and yet it is paradoxically organic. You discover subtle adjustments with quite satisfying results. To onlookers, it is quite decorative. The software is performing "video feedback" with results very similar to what you could achieve with a video camera and a classic cathode-ray color TV set by adjusting the position, zoom, focus, and the tv knobs Hue, Contrast, and Brightness.
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2017 Furniture Project: Dining Set |  |
Furniture designed for an AirBnb, custom fitted for nook. All 3/4" plywood, CNC cut from original desgin. Uses novel twist-lock assembly.
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