Studio Staff

I'm fortunate to work with some very cool and talented people. 

Currently, Mark Beasley (code), Travis Saul (3d), Michelle Graves (design), and Bill Catino (code) make big contributions to work in the studio.


Project Notes

Amalgamations

Most of the early amalgamation print work (Playboy, Class, Homes, 76BJs) was made with code I wrote in C on Unix-based SGIs using Paul Haeberli's SGI file format.

Later amalgamation work (Decades, Late Night, Special Moments) was done in C/C++ on Windows boxes with the ImageMagick C++ libraries.  I did The Song of the Century manually with PC audio software (I honestly cannot remember what software, but I did download a few of the cover songs with the original Napster)

For the City and Loop pieces, we actually modelled much of Chicago's Loop as semi-transparent, textured rectangles and rendered this "city" from typical tourist vantage points.  All of this was done in Maya.  The Portrait pieces were done with Processing.


Data Visualization

Early data abstraction work (Shoes, Yellow Dots, Height & Weight) was done with a combination of C & MEL (and tons of raw data). They were then built and rendered with early versions of Maya.


Color-Averaged Frames

The The Grand Unification Theory pieces were also written in C on SGIs and the data was gathered using a capture board on an Indy. I used a bunch of Unix scripting (grep, sort, etc) to organize & rank the captured frames.

I wrote the software for Everything, All at Once (Part I & Part II) in C for the SGI O2 platform using their DMedia libraries. Big thanks to Todd Margolis for helping out with DMedia coding. I did Everything, All at Once (Part III) in C# for PCs using a nice Directshow .NET port and some off-the-shelf TV-board hardware.

The software for the "color-per-frame" print work (Titanic, MTV, Emblem) was all written in C/C++ on PCs with earlier versions of ImageMagick. Frame capture was done with available capture hardware. Related video work (Top 6 & Top 25) was done similarly, with finishing in After Effects.


3D Graphics

The figures in Diagram for the Apprehension of Simple Forces were arranged from a template I drew, by a C plugin I wrote for Alias PowerAnimator 7. I rendered it on an Onyx over many, many nights at one of my old video game jobs, the long defunct Viacom New Media.

The two 3d-animated video pieces (Form Study, Still Life), though constructed differently from one another, were both rendered in Maya. Form Study was completely auto-generated with a combination of C & MEL code. The continuous video was assembled with a C/ImageMagick app I wote. Still Life is essentially a hand-made and -designed work with some custom MEL tools thrown-in.

The most ambitious rendering challenge I've undertaken to this point, the entire digital cave project was built & rendered with Maya, and edited in After Effects & Final Cut.  The project would not have been possible without the help of Travis Saul (3D powerhouse), Michelle Graves (editing), Alex Dunn (data wrangling) & Mark Beasley (tools). Larry Smallwood rocked the installation production and, finally, big thanks to curator Richard Born (Smart Museum).


Miscellaneous

My only real robotic work to date, this piece was controlled by a big ole HyperTalk program running on my first real computer, a Macintosh SE. The "robot" was 2 solenoids, controlling a TV remote, interfaced to an EZIO board.