Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Position/title: Creative director and co-founder at Electronic Countermeasures, LLC
Current project(s): Production/video design for Exo/Endo, an experimental music group, and 11s, a microtonal band; graphic identity and interactive design for Michael Yr Jeannouxa Day and Forgotten Characters, a series of live-performance video projects and visual studies working with the elements of the extended ASCII character library, designed to create onscreen graphics in the age of text-only computing experiences.
Most notable achievements: Masters of Fine Art in Experimental Animation and Integrated Media; starting Electronic Countermeasures and its continued success and survival; singing Bach’s Mass In B Minor with the Oratorio Society of New York in Carnegie Hall.
When I started in this industry: I started as a local crew stagehand in 2001 to put myself through college. I worked on my first show as a content creator in 2012 with Mode Studios.
How I got into this industry: Between working on concerts, studying animation, and programming, I decided I wanted to combine these three things that I loved doing into a career. I needed more collaborators, time, space, and resources to make it a reality, so I applied to an MFA program in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts, I designed for individual musicians, dancers, performance ensembles, and theatre students, resulting in 25 video or interactive shows that I had a hand in or designed in my time there. One of my teachers, Pablo Molina, brought me into the professional fold during my last semester to work on the content for a pop show, and I’ve been doing a fantastic mix of large commercial projects and art pieces ever since. My partner Emery Martin and I started our company, Electronic Countermeasures, as a wrapper for all of our jobs and projects in video, electronics, interactivity, music, and design.
Influences: Ryoji Ikeda, Anthony McCall, Vilém Flusser, Nonotak, Bob Bonniol, LeRoy Bennett, 7 Wonders, Massimiliano Fuksas, Yohji Yamamoto, and Phillip Stearns.
Worst advice I’ve ever heard: “You can stay awake for five days before the auditory hallucinations start.” That’s wrong. It’s more like three, but you get used to them. There is a pervasive suggestion that sleep is for the weak or one can sleep when one is dead. Taking care of yourself is hard sometimes and occasionally downright impossible when the adrenaline runs high, and the deadlines are tight. Still, sleep is important. More often than not, after some rest and exercise, I do much more to a problem than I would have done sitting up with it for the entire time. Balance is difficult to find during projects, but it is a good goal to strive for.
Best advice I’ve ever heard: Expose yourself to new perspectives and ideas. Read. Go see shows and hear lectures. Go see art, and go listen to the symphony or experimental noise music. Go to museums and aquariums and planetariums. Go for walks. Get out from behind the screen, and experience the world around you. And then, read more.
My favorite thing about the production industry: Production is an industry that thrives by constantly pushing the bounds of what’s possible. This means never being bored or complacent as a practitioner. There are always new things to learn and experiment with and new combinations of tested techniques to try. Every show is a new canvas painted with processes and equipment, styles, and personalities. Discovering how it all fits together and working with fantastic people makes me excited for every day I get to create something amazing.
Favorite design/programming/technical trick: Hands down, Open Sound Control and Syphon. For OSC, all you need is a simple network (wireless or wired) to connect all sorts of programs and hardware together. If I have an obscure, hardware-based audio processing unit, an iPad, and an app written in openFrameworks, if OSC can talk to them all, I have networked control. It isn’t too hard to write modules to translate OSC into a format that the program/hardware does understand if it doesn’t support it natively. This means I can be completely flexible in the tools and software I use to build systems, knowing that multi-program or multi-device control is sorted out. Syphon allows me to share video streams between multiple programs, so if I program a series of interactive or generative animations to use in a show, I can put them into a more traditional video playback program like Resolume or Millumin to handle the timeline, cueing, masking, mapping, etc. without incurring latency in the transfer.
Plans for the future: I plan to keep moving forward in this vector, meet new people, try bolder and bigger things, and enjoy the work I do.
Other interests/side gigs: Textile design, 3D printing, printmaking, analog synthesizers, playing the flute, and singing in local choirs.
Awards, honors: Having pieces featured in the Ruhrtriennale at PACT Zollverein, the CalArts 40th reunion gala, and The Contemporary, Austin.