The EM Brace is a wearable device for physically engaging with the ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted by computers and other consumer electronics and electrical systems in general. The goal of this project is to make palpable and audible the hidden the invisible electromagnetic frequencies permeating everyday being, the same frequencies which provide the main transmission medium for radio, SMS text messaging, visible light, wireless internet connections and that radiate outwardly from any object with an active electrical current.

As a device for exploring and navigating these hidden "hertzian" spaces, the EM Brace accentuates the boundlessness of the quantum levels at which this microscopic merging of phyiscal bodies with electronic devices takes place, while simultaneously situating the body in relation to consumer and communication technologies.

The EM Brace has been featured in Make, EMF Interface, Neatorama, a Hack a Day and Rhizome.

Project Homepage

Zoraida is an ongoing collaboration with musician/choreographer Nancy Garcia. It is multi-media performance piece based on a narrative imagining Cuba's speculative future. For the project, we have fabricated three instruments based on Cuban/West-African cultural objects. The first instrument is an object for voice containing a built-in microphone housed within a large elephant statue and three knobs for controlling vocal processing parameters attached to smaller elephant statues.

The second object is for movement, and is made out of a machete and a wireless accelerometer. The accelerometer sends x,y,z cartesian data that is mapped to midi-notes and used to control a synthesizer via Max/MSP and Ableton Live.

The third object is a pair of congas mic'd with piezo film so that the audio signals produced when playing the drums can control video in real-time. This is accomplished via Max/MSP/Jitter.

More info on my blog.

Photos and video of the final project.

AskDubya.com was developed with Josh Knowles and it allows users to ask President Bush questions.

When users ask the President a question, the text in the user's query is checked against a MySQL database containing all of Bush's speeches from January 2007-May 2007, and markov chains produce a relevant textual reply. The results are non-sensical, evasive, and diverge from the topic-at-hand, just like a real-life press conference.

While Technology Assistant at Rhizome, I developed a set of web widgets for dynamically integrating Rhizome content on external sites and blogs.

Creating the widgets required a mix of html, css, javascript, php, MySQL, and they were completed under the guidance of Rhizome's Director of Technology Patrick May.

You can view and grab the widgets on their Rhizome page

This device finds the inherent sonority of objects. It’s housed in a collectible Rambo lunch box, and the circuit takes a 9 volt battery. The device is a hacked object that hacks other objects by turning them into mediums of sound/resonant bodies via a custom built piezo driver, supplanting their intended use-value in the process.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s musings on “the collector”, I decided to use a collectible object to house the circuit in because I feel like collecting objects can be understood as a precursor to hacking objects in that collecting, like hacking, is an attempt at replace commodity value for values outside of the “cycle of exchange”. In the case of collecting, these values are personal and aesthetic, as for the collector the collected object is an art object to be displayed and embedded with the personal meanings (where i got the object, that time in my life, why i choose this object and not others). The object’s use-value and exchange-value are null and frozen within the collection.

The hacked object, though, is given different values. Its use-value is not null but transformed into other use-values and functions as determined by the hacker. New personal values arise as well, as the hacker feels a degree of control and closeness to this “new” object s/he has created, as opposed to the alienation (ala Marx) and distance between the consumer and commodity.

Video and more...

This patch was developed for a set of electronic drums, but could be modified to be used with any instrument that send midi data or any percussion instruments with triggers.

It allows for me to take an sound file, break it into small samples, and then trigger/filter those smaller samples with electronic drums. As well, this patch records incoming midi data so to make it available for playback and looping. This patch generates some pretty interesting noises for drums, and the impetus to build this patch came from my search to find novel ways to incorporate the potential of digial sound with my percussion background.

The Sola-System is a portable, solar-powered audio amplifier for use with portable mp3-players and electric instruments. It's pushes about 10 watts per channel through two 8-inch speakers.

Video and technical info can be found here.

The Sola-System has been featured in Make Magazine Blog, Ecofriend, Zedomax and Dance-tech.

The act of reading consists of a twofold relationship between text and reader. A text is a world wrought with careful choices and composed of deliberate details. Internal mechanisms guide or manipulate the reader and set certain processes in motion; circumstances are dealt, limitations are imposed, and positions are impelled. Intertext is a visual analogy illuminating this two-way relationship between reader and text. It represents how a text both forms and informs the reader as well as how the reader molds and animates the text.

Encased within a hollowed version of James Joyce’s Ulysses (chosen for its physical and metaphorical depth, its continual susceptibility to new modes of interpretation, and the novel’s play with how meaning is extracted by the reader) is an LCD screen displaying Joyce’s image as rendered by a mosaic of the novel’s text. While the reader peers into the book, the words shift from showing the representation of Joyce to an image of the viewer captured by a nearby camera.

Video and more...

Written in Java & Processing and co-developed with Tim Stutts, Haiku News turns RSS news feeds from envirnomental sites like Greenpeace into haikus. This project was conceived as an elegant and simple means of countering the glut of information, particularly news, thrown at us from the internet. Random wit and irony can be read from the results, and they often serve as a sort of chance commentary on the natural world and its relationship to mankind. For now, please demo the Beta version we’ve made in Processing for online use here. Refreshing the browser will result in a new Haiku.

A collaboration with Allistar Peters and Chul Song, FeelSound was a very functional and interesting way to sculpt and manipulate sound with the hand. As users moved their hands through two pans full of lentils and peas, force sensing resistors triggered sounds corresponding to the hand movements. Although not a typical interface, the vegetables proved a wondeful tactile componant for the project and received very positive user feedback.