Art + Technology Integration Specialist / Intermedia 3D CAVE Curator.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Facilitate Interdisciplinary Arts and Technologies collaborations across campus, Develop and teach New Media courses, curate a new digital gallery space at Krannert Art Museum. Curate and write software tools to help artists create works for CANVAS, a 3-walled VR CAVE™ open lab and art studio located in museum. Address daily technical needs for Art Museum and websites. http://www.canvas.uiuc.edu.

2005-present

New Media + Programming Instructor.
Description: Develop and teach a course at the University of Illinois entitled "Computer Programming For Artists." Course website here. Languages taught: Lingo, Actionscript, Coldfusion, C++, OpenGL, Processing, html. In 2005 I received a Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Illinois.

1999-01

Freelance New Media Technologist and Digital Designer.
Description: Create, design and program CD-ROMs, digital media, integrate podcasting, blogging and other software into websites using Coldfusion, ASP, Perl-CGI, Java, Flash, Shockwave. Clients include Indianapolis Museum of Art, Visual Understanding in Education, Warner Bros. Records, University of Illinois, American Association of Equine Practitioners, University of California Los Angeles Hammer Museum, Freer-Sackler Gallery Washington DC, The Library of Congress, Thrill Jockey Records, Touch&Go Records. [small sample of design work]

Flight Simulator / Assembler-language programmer.
Programmed walk-in flight simulators with 6-axis motion bases and large-scale visual systems at chip-level, in 8086/386 assembler.

06-07. Right now I am incorporating ideas of performance into critique of commerce and machine and electronically-mediated nature. Coming from a strong background in music and martial arts, my passion is performance and energy transference; my academic background gives me a firm grounding in math and computer science, so my interests lie in the conceptual art path laid out by Duchamp (the ready-made is as obvious as computer science!) and Fluxus (more computer programs!). My love of punk rock sends me toward transaction art and social commentary (like RTMark.)

A History of New timeline
2007. Web interface and Gallery installation of Web2.0 formatted art and technology timeline. Now on view at Krannert Art Museum. View and add to it here: http://www.kam.uiuc.edu/projects/historyOfNew/

The Economics Room
2006. With Richard Powers, Nicholas Duchnowski, Abby Watt and Erin Miller. Pages 85-88 of Plowing The Dark describe an immersive CAVE environment. With Richard Powers' help, we have taken this passage and animated it according to real-time world economics activity.

Roadside Conversations
2006. With Richard Valentin and Steve Kostell. Created a travelling video/audio recording and playback station to travel on the 50th Anniversary commemoration of the Eisenhower Interstate System. Travelled across the country on I-80 recording visitors' narratives about the interstate. http://www.roadsideconversations.org.

Tickets To The Sunset
2005. I convinced Ticketmaster's web outlet, Ticketweb to give me a promoter's account and allow me to post a tour of Sunset dates and times, as if the sun was going on tour. Tickets were available for purchase at Ticketweb.com. Audio field recording of the sunset by famed recording engineer Steve Albini was available on iTunes, Real, Napster, etc. Posters by Jay Ryan still available at http://www.ticketsToTheSunset.com. This piece is about commerce and machine-mediated nature and draws from such influences as Turrell, Flavin, Duchamp and RTmark™.

Windgarden 2D and 3D
2001-5. Digital representation of a "wind garden" - Champaign, Il airspeed is retrieved via random weather server and displayed as movement. Cursor movement also affects display of garden. Try hitting "g" and see what happens. This and the following pieces are studies of the concept of nature mediated by machine. 3D version exhibited on horizontal immersadesk at iDMAA, Orlando, 2005. <launch shockwave>

Tornado Landspeeder
2005. An application for a 3D virtual reality CAVE environment (shown here on CANVAS), this is a data visualization of 200 M of tornado data using texture maps from the landscape where the data was generated. Exhibited at iDMAA, Orlando, 2005.

Tornadoes
2003. Study for windgarden; Translation of number of tornado deaths per year, frequency data from years 1959 to 1999 into digital candlelight. How can I translate cold, raw data into a more organic monument?

Sun Clock

2004. We have split up our days - our lives - into an artificial grid of numbers which map onto other schedules; work / factory schedules, TV schedules, movie schedules, even further removed from nature. Why have we done this? Historically, factory owners developed watches in order to keep the workers in line. TV network schedules now are our new clocks.

As an answer to this, Sun Clock uses a color system to denote passage of time. Each hour is mapped to a median color representative of the sky on A Nice Day at that particular time, and each minute the color is interpolated from the previous hour's color to the next hour's color. The color of the bar on your screen slowly changes over a period of 24 hours. Predecessor to Tickets To The Sunset. <launch shockwave>

Performance
1987-present. I am a classically trained pianist who read music before text, who has been performing as a professional punk-rock bass player, playing live shows for over 15 years in the US and Europe. I am known for an incredibly active stage performance, knocking myself around back and forth on the stage until I am sometimes bruised. My performance is informed by concepts of energy transference, eastern philosophy, and martial arts.

I step off the stage and into the audience each night, and speak with fans, stay at their houses, teach them computer programming, implore them to stay in school. I have been writing online tour reports (predecessor to blogging) since 1994, podcasting since 1998, and creating new media for audio CDs since it first became possible, all the time taking extra care to teach fans that they can do all these things too.

Performative Navigational Devices

2003, 2006. Fist Punching Wall drives Narrative. I sit with my back against a brick wall, a video projector shines a narrative above me. The narrative progresses as I bang my fist against the wall.

2003. Outside Air Pressure to Audio to Visual. Experiment with windchimes outdoors, audio is translated via microphone into sound wave data, changes in amplitude drives graphics on CRT inside building.

2003. Camera-Captured Foot Movement Drives Visual. Using a camera on the ground and video capture software, translated change in motion (feet moving) to "kick up" a bunch of words on a screen.

A History of New
2007. Curated exhibit at the CANVAS Gallery of Krannert Art Museum which examines artists' use of new technologies. Exhibit contains small experimental VR Worlds written in KAMScript for the CANVAS CAVE and a web2.0 format timeline of art and inventions at http://www.kam.uiuc.edu/projects/historyOfNew - entries broadcast live on wall of gallery.

Tools For Artists - KAMScript
2005-ongoing. I am currently supervising development of software tools that will enable non-programming artists to easily create 3D artwork in a CAVE setting. KAMScript allows artists to place jpegs and mp3s in a 3D environment using a regular text file and a normal cartesian (X, Y, Z) coordinate system. This software is already in use at the CANVAS and will be available for free download at http://www.canvas.uiuc.edu. (Paper to be presented at EVA2007, Florence, Italy, in progress)

mIxtapesTRY
2006. MIX TAPEStry is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving the Pratt School of Engineering and the Music Department at Duke and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. MIX TAPEStry is an interactive, networked performance of music and graphics triggered by people moving under web cameras in the CIEMAS Studio and in the Krannert Art Museum at UIUC. The music is an adaptation of a hip hop track called "Lemonade" by Duke Adjunct Faculty member, Robi Roberts (a.k.a. J. Bully). J. Bully will perform his song while music and graphics by UIUC faculty member John Jennings are generated simultaneously at both locations. http://vis.duke.edu/Research/mixtapestry/

Icons
2006. Curated exhibit at the CANVAS Gallery at Krannert Art Museum.

Calcul*rt
2006. Co-curated exhibit at the CANVAS Gallery of Krannert Art Museum which explores the boundaries between Mathematics and Art. With George Francis (Mathematics Professor) and Hank Kaczmarski (Director of the Integrated Systems Laboratory, Beckman Institute).

CANVAS
2005-ongoing. Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio (CANVAS) at the Krannert Art Museum of the University of Illinois at Urbana. CANVAS is a 3-screened, back-projectioned portable virtual-reality open-lab for research and teaching projects by faculty in the fine and applied arts and the University. Informed by the concepts of collaboration, advanced navigation, and virtual art, CANVAS is a space for creating and presenting computer-assisted multi-dimensional projects. I am in charge of administering, obtaining projects, writing tools, assisting faculty use, and programming applications for this space. See http://www.canvas.uiuc.edu for more details and list of projects currently underway.
CANVAS and I were featured in the Sun Jan 8th 2006 New York Times article "In Love With Reality Truly, Madly, Virtually" by Michael Rush.

Landspeeder
2002-5. My first virtual worlds work at University of Illinois. Working under Urban Planning Professor Varkki George Pallathucheril, I developed a 4-D data visualization of a large dataset for a 3-D Virtual Reality CAVE environment. I began building this project in VRML, then ported it to Macromedia Director (3D Lingo), then to C++ and OpenGL for use in a CAVE environment. http://www.rehearsal.uiuc.edu/people/rose/landspeeder/

photo courtesy of VUE

Visual Thinking Strategies Art Education Program
1999-2006. Visual Understanding in Education (VUE) conducts educational research focused on aesthetic and cognitive development that results from interaction with art. Based on its findings, VUE develops programs for schools and museums, principally Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). I have been authoring CD-ROMs for teachers to use with VTS and now am acting as consultant for VUE's new teacher-trainer portal which will have outreach and interaction capabilities such as newsgroups and podcasts. (in progress: http://www.vtstraining.org.)

Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) Digital Online
2005-6.With its new X-room and immersive interactive displays, the IMA is embracing future technology. I am acting as technical consultant and creating blogging and podcasting sites for various exhibitions. http://fgtblog.ima-digital.org.

"Junior Citizen" Floppy Disk Interactive Press Kit
1995. For Sire Records. This floppy disk sampler played upon the idea that TV and remote-control channel switching was still more exciting than most current interactive design. American Center for Design Annual 100 Show winner.

RTFM, Enhanced CD-ROM
1997. For Reprise Records. First of many Enhanced-CDs that I created, this one employs 3D modeling + real life with multi-node Quicktime VR movie as a navigational metaphor for an E-CD database filled with games, tutorials, and band information. [Quicktime sample]