ABOUT
I am a mathematician, video artist, educator, community organizer, and soft/hardware designer. I grew up on a dairy farm in northern wisconsin and put in rather a lot of time playing in punk, metal, and noise bands through the 90s and 00’s. A long, drawn out, and mostly part time college career led to an undergraduate degree in mathematics from UW Madison in 2010, an increased recognition of class stratification in the USA, and a serious disenchantment with the academic military industrial complex.
Sometime in the early teens while living in Chicago I started performing live audio visual sets using crude video performance tools I created out of dumpstered computer parts & analog video gear. I continued to scrape by living month to month on the fringes of the service industry, learning that college degrees divorced from the kind of mindset and networks that a middle class background provides are practically speaking somewhat less than worthless in the modern US job world. Mathematics in particular is a great degree to have that makes you seem simultaneously over and underqualified for most jobs. I think most of the folks in my graduating class ended up working for like facebook or the NSA (same difference i thought then, and think even more so now).
I ended up living in Brooklyn around 2018 with the goal of trying to figure out some kind of self employment situation that would enable me to spend the majority of my time working on interesting creative projects, providing some kind of beneficial service to others beyond that of simply walking the dogs or brewing the coffee of the precarious micro castes one level above me, and being able to prioritize spending quality time with my loved ones over grinding for rent. Turns out I was mostly able to figure these things out, but only by the sheer luck of getting run over by a fucking car while on a dog walking gig.
Yes, getting run over by a car in New York is actually considered lucky, much to my surprise. No-fault laws mean that some kind of insurance payout is almost guaranteed for the pedestrian or bicyclist victim of a car accident. The payout check I received from this accident was literally the most money I had ever had in my bank account in my life up to this point. Not only that, the workers comp checks I got helped keep me solvent, fed, and housed during my long physical recovery. Due to lack of much in the way of mobility, I spent the vast majority of this time teaching myself c++ and glsl and building out the core code components of what later became Video Waaaves, Waaave Pool, and Gravity Waaaves. And once I got mobile again, flush with the payout, I was able to fund both the start of Phase Space and my fledgling video synthesizer sales business.
Lets just stop for a moment and consider this for a second: You most likely wouldn’t have heard of me, used any of my video art tools, or even be reading this right now if I hadn’t been run over by a car in Brooklyn. I’m grateful that I was able to seize this opportunity but its also kind of fucked if you think about it for even 2 seconds. This kind of shit just really hammers down my sincere beliefs that political and economic systems that force the vast majority of human beings to grind away at meaningless and often actively harmful jobs in order to simply maintain their inherited levels of poverty are terrible.
Flash forward to 2022 and I had managed to eke out a fairly comfortable middle class lifestyle based entirely on teaching technical and artistic skills via Phase Space & online endeavors as well as sales of VSERPI. I was beginning to discover that this had been heavily subsidized by the unofficial Universal Basic Income program that was basically in place for a large chunk of the covid years. Keeping folks out of their shitty offices and offering unemployment checks to basically anyone who asked led to a massive increase in folks interested in learning about audio and video synthesis, and due to releasing some edutainment youtube video series at pretty much exactly the right time, I had become one of the poster children of surging interest in video synthesis. A ‘child’ who was already over 40 years old at this point, but my dissolute and inconsistent lifestyle has apparently left me without the pear shaped dispair that typically descends on those who end up putting in 10 years plus as desk jockeys in cubical purgatories. I could see that this gravy train was about to get derailed tho, and decided that being tied to a lease in one of the most expensive cities in the world might not be the best long term plan.
The trade wars, parts shortages, end of covid era eviction moratoriums and guaranteed unemployment checks, and rise of savage price gouging by US corporations hoping to increase profits off the economic fallout of the escalating war in Ukraine killed off most any hope I had of keeping my self employed ass afloat in Brooklyn. My partner and I bought a van in 2023 and went on a cross country road trip living in national forests and doing a series of workshops and residencies from coast to coast. Nearly everywhere we visited we saw both evidence of severely escalating inequality contrasted with dedicated media artists doing their best to keep their communities strong against the uncaring economic and political forces allayed against them. We were amazed to have the opportunity to visit so many places, make so many new friends, teach video synthesis techniques to so many people, but even without a lease in Brooklyn, our income as travelling artists & teachers couldn’t really offset the steadily escalating cost of living.
So now its winter 2024 as I write this update. I tried going back to video synthesizer hardware sales and teaching online this year, but overall profits are just barely enough to keep going on both of those fronts. Theres not really any reason to feel like the trend of extreme economic precarity is likely to end anytime soon, for me or for the majority of US citizens in general. I am, however hopeful that I’ll be able to continue on as a general self employed video synthesis wizard by shifting to software sales, my expanding work with Video Sync organizing national community focused events for the video art world, and getting the odd well paying gig tossed my way from my more academically tolerant friends looking to bring me temporarily into their classroom environments. If not, I guess I can always get a CDL or whatever ;)
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O T H E R * T H I N G S * A B O U T * M E
- here is my CV
- here are some of my social media accounts. Please note: I don’t really use anything except mastodon, scanlines, matrix, or email for actual personal human, social, or business interactions online. I don’t really hang out socially on instagram, discord, tik tok, or whatever else i need to sign up for next to help out promotions and whatnot. SO I’m almost definitely not going to follow you back, look at your stories, respond to comments, and goodness gracious I’m not going use messenger like its some kind of actually useful and functional method of communication. I am not going to be your ‘friend’ on venmo, that is so fucking weird. And lets not even pretend like facebook is a thing anymore. Its not because I don’t like you or don’t find your artwork interesting or don’t want to talk to you, its because I hate being on instagram/tiktok/discord/etc and honestly I know that you do too. Also I’m like just barely popular enough on these things that its pretty untenable for me to even try to keep up with the number of messages, comments, tags etc that get thrown my way.
Imagine that you had a friend who would ONLY ever talk to you if you met them at Dave and Busters. Thats how I feel about people who are unable to maintain online relationships outside of corporate social media frameworks. I am currently deeply ambivilant about all of the parasocial relationships that I’m currently on the recieving end of, so if we end up in some kind of email conversation, try not to get all weird at me plz. All that said, I love email and I love making new and interesting friends online, its just not gonna happen from chance encounters on any of those corporate walled gardens anymore.
Mastodon
TikTok
Youtube
patreon
ko-fi
I’ve got an infrequent newsletter that i send out whenever I’ve got interesting events of some kind on the horizon. you can subscribe here. mostly it ends up being about Video Synthesis Ecosphere stuffs, but also will have occasional info on events whenever i end up doing more eventy stuffs.
If you appreciate the public domain open source software and educational materials I provide and can afford to spare some cash it is highly appreciated! The more donations I recieve the more time I have to spend on developing these resources! Please also consider subscribing to my patreon page as small amounts of regular income are appreciated as well! Or you could also support my ko-fi if you like getting stickers and stuff on a regular basis.