About

I’m an artist and technologist working with volumetric video and imagery, geospatial data, and video games. I bring real people and places into digital environments, but I’m just as interested in what happens in the other direction: when a game’s rules or the decisions of a distant audience begin to shape someone’s physical life.

One project imagines a contemporary Oregon Trail, with me as the playable character. I would travel from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon, guided by strangers on the internet. I would design the game, but I would also have to live with decisions made by people I might never meet. The project gives real-world consequences to choices that usually play out on a screen. It draws on my interests in surveillance, digital nomadism, and urban isolation, asking how much of ourselves we surrender when we invite an audience to participate.

A project I began during my graduate studies later became The Peak Beyond, a retail technology company I founded ten years ago, where I currently serve as CTO. It is a commercial application of an interest that also runs through my artwork: how physical objects can become a way into a digital experience. I have also worked as an artist/researcher in residence at IBM Research and as a creative developer at BitTorrent and Butchershop.

After studying materials science and engineering in college, I spent a year and a half making my way up the West Coast from Mexico to Canada—walking, cycling, hitchhiking, and working on farms for food and shelter. Along the way, I visited libraries to read books on programming and practiced writing code on paper. I eventually settled in San Francisco, where I found community hackerspaces like Noisebridge. There, I learned electronics and programming from people who were willing to share their tools, time, and knowledge.

I believe education should be free. Much of what made my work possible was offered freely: access to a workshop, an explanation from someone more experienced, an invitation to try. I want that kind of access to be available to anyone with the curiosity to use it.

School costs money, but learning is free.