goawaygeek

Warpdrive

Warpdrive is a generative art and audio-based game that was built in Phaser3 and launched with Coinbase's Onchain Vision promotion. In it, you get to rack up points by keeping Warpy from tripping by tapping to a beat. You can speed up the tempo to score more points or drop out whenever you like to 'mint' your finished artwork. Make art and die, as we like to say.

Sarah

I worked with Lynn Hershman Leeson on her 2023 short film Cyborgian Rhapsody – Immortality. For this film, Lynn co-authored the film interviewing a chatbot I wrote for her using GPT-3 completions API (this was pre the chatGPT craze!). The character was turned into a 3D avatar and for the viewing at the Mill Valley Film Festival, we did a live Q&A with the bot. It was written using the GPT-3 (& 4) completions API, Google's Speech to Text API, Eleven Labs Text to Speech API, NVidia's Audio2Face app piped into a Meta Human in Unreal Engine with some Python and Max/MSP controlling everything. There were many other pieces of glue and sticky tape used for it too.

Cyclops

I worked with Trevor Paglen to create Cyclops, a very, very weird "game" and NFT project. Each 'level' within the game was an audio track that contained a puzzle (or, sometimes, puzzles). The solutions to the puzzles were entered into a PDP 10 emulator found on the web at cyclops.sh. There are still vinyl records of this available if you want to email me ;)

Artblocks NFTs

There were two NFT projects that came with Cyclops, both contained puzzles. Both were released on the Art Blocks platform. Preludes required you to play the audio track generated by the NFT through an oscilloscope which would provide you with three words. Crypt required you to decode a visual puzzle by finding a way to break the code by noticing there was a pattern you could solve to generate a key. No matter how strong your cryptography there's always a chance you leave it open :/

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Prapti

I worked with my old boss and good friend Ross Bencina on Prapti, an LLM interface that allowed you to converse directly in Markdown files. We were both frustrated with the interfaces to LLMs at the time, and this went a long way to solving a lot of those frustrations. It is open source and extensible, but if you're looking for something to use now, it is probably easier to use something that has received millions of dollars in funding :)

Tokyo Arcade

I designed and built a custom arcade cabinet for the Bright Moments Tokyo gallery. The joystick, buttons, and LEDs were all controlled by Python on a Raspberry Pi. That was sent over OSC to an Intel Nuc running Touch Designer which displayed graphics locally and on a giant TV Wall. Most importantly, my son thought it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen. View it here

Digital Mirrors

I made some digital mirrors for Bright Moments Mexico City gallery. Users would light a candle in front of the mirror which would trigger a light sensor on a Raspberry Pi and fade in their NFT to them behind a two-way mirror. After 45 seconds or so, the Pi would trigger an air pump to blow out the candle and the scene would reset.

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Bright Moments in London

For Bright Moments in London, I built another experiential piece that showed you your NFT in a 'jewelry' box that spoke to a player piano. Upon entering the space, you were seated on a couch where you could unlock your jewelry box and view a tiny (49 pixel x 49 pixel) version of your NFT. Simultaneously, the Pi would send OSC over WiFi to a Mac Mini that would trigger the MIDI file that accompanied the NFT and played them on a Yamaha Disklavier player piano.

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Bright Moments

I was a co-founder of and Director of Technology for Bright Moments, an IRL NFT gallery that started in Venice Beach (Los Angeles) before opening pop-up galleries in NYC, Berlin, London, Mexico City, and Tokyo (amongst others). I wrote the original software to display NFTs on the TVs that powered the galleries. We worked with amazing artists in beautiful locations. Thanks to TV Drums for the Swift knowledge I needed to get this thing off the ground and to Sebi for teaching me Node :)

Infinite Coyote

Infinite Coyote is a finetuned GPT-2 model that was trained on the visual descriptions of the MCA Chicago catalog. As it is a completions LLM, you can start to describe an artwork you would like to see and allow it to finish off the description for you, inspired by works in the collection. Because it's a collection based on 'modern' art, it loves to get naked in weird ways.

TV Drums

I wanted to teach myself some Swift so naturally I used the sensors on seven iOS devices to act as drum triggers when connected to an Apple TV which acts as the drum brain. Mayhem ensues. More info over at the Github repo: https://github.com/goawaygeek/TVDrums

What's the matter with you (rock)?

I co-lectured this course on interaction design in museum exhibitions at RMIT University with Scott Mitchell in the first semester of 2020. Sadly COVID-19 arrived and the exhibition that students were designing for had to be postponed. I was incredibly impressed by the work they managed to do during a very difficult semester.

Art Processors

Art Processors is an experiential design consultancy I co-founded in 2011 (and left in January 2020). From a team of three co-founders and one single client we were able to grow it to a staff of over 30 people with millions of dollars in revenue and offices in Australia and the US by the time I left. During this time I worked with clients such as The Getty, Smithsonian Institution, Museum Victoria, Melbourne Zoo, and more. Our work has been covered by the likes of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist and many others. Company website

Freer|Sackler Gallery Digital Experience

A digital experience built for the Smithsonian Institution's Freer|Sackler Gallery in Washington DC. I'm most proud of the framework we designed for increasing access to the gallery and content which you can find written up in a paper for the Access Smithsonian/Institute for Human Centered Design Inclusive Interactives Publication (coming later in 2020, but summarised on the Art Processors's website here)

I, Animal

A very 'hard to explain but incredibly executed' piece of digitally enhanced theatre that we worked on for the Melbourne Zoo. An interactive guide (on an iPod touch) gave instructions to an active audience leading them around the zoo as they were told stories of animal conservation and human emotion. Possibly my favourite project I've ever worked on. Read more on the Art Processors's site

The O - Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

The project that started it all as they say. Used now by millions of visitors at Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). It really revolutionised what digital technology could do when properly designed to work with the space it was designed for. Mona has a lot of weird art but no wall labels to describe it, instead you get The O. It helps you navigate the underground warren that is Mona (and do a lot more!). I wrote the original iOS code (and maintained it for a few years before the company started to really grow and we hired more developers). It truly is unlike anything else you've experienced. But don't take my word for it though, take David Walsh's (eccentric, gambler, art aficionado and Director of Art Processors); here's how he described it

Summer Cats

Remember up the top there where I said 'recovering musician' well here is the most widely visible example of that. We were an indiepop band that released a bunch of obscure records and quickly faded from people's memories. We were lucky enough to release records on one of my favourite labels of all time, Oakland's Slumberland Records. Go and buy our last 7" on Slumberland, it is my favourite release of ours. Or get really crazy and grab all our music from bandcamp

The Modular Garden

I did a rather weird Master's degree. I was embedded in RMIT University's Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory researching design practice through exegesis. To do this I reflected heavily on my own design practice as part of an Australian Research Council grant provided to study the acoustic properties of Japanese gardens. I undertook a study of Japanese garden soundscapes and used it as the basis for creating a programatically driven soundscape using various synthesis techniques to generate and mimic the real world acoustic environment found in Japanese gardens. It eventuated with a sound installation capable of changing based on time of day and year. All audio was generated using SuperCollider over a multi speaker diffusion system or hardware synthesis modules that I soldered together myself. You can read the exegesis here

AudioMulch

AudioMulch is software built for live performance, audio processing, sound design and music composition. It has been used by the likes of Girl Talk and Pete Townsend (you know, from The Who!). I worked for Ross Bencina to help with the port of AudioMulch 2.0 to OS X back in 2008 (-ish). I wrote a bunch of the native OS X code (CoreMidi, persistence settings store, VST hosting, etc.), primarily in C++ but also some Objective-C, there could have even been some Python in there for the Scons scripts, it was a long time ago now!

Knock Yr. Socks Off Records

I also release records sometimes. I've been fortunate to be able to release records for some of my favourite artists of all time including Eux Autres, Saturday Looks Good to Me, The Motifs, Milk Teddy and Business of Dreams (and others, I love them all like children, honestly, no favourites!). There is an outdated website here and a bandcamp page (equally outdated) here