The Creators Project: Who are you and what do you do?
Kyle McDonald: I’m an artist with a background in philosophy and computer science, and a love for sound. Sometimes my work is more conceptual like keytweeter, where I auto-tweeted every 140 characters I typed for a whole year; or Only Everything Lasts Forever, which is a sound composition that contains all of the sounds we can distinguish as humans. Other times my work is more focused on interaction, whether it’s about new techniques for sensing in 3D, helping people see each other in new ways, or just getting people to dance.What hardware do you use?
Because I work with code incessantly, I would be almost completely lost without a laptop. Beyond that, it changes a lot. Yesterday I was working with a Kinect and a Canon T2i. A couple weeks ago, it was an Arduino and some custom built piezoelectric drum triggers. Then a couple months ago I was surrounded by six Alienware machines, full of the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, running to twelve 1080p screens, using the heat from the computers to warm a chilly Brooklyn studio. So it really depends on the project. I try to keep only what I absolutely need, because I get ideas from everything—and I’m already overflowing with ideas, so having more stuff can just be distracting.What software do you use?
I’ve spent a lot of time with Max/MSP, Reason, and Live in the past—and Processing has been essential for almost a decade now. But the two most important pieces of software I’m using at the moment are GitHub and openFrameworks. openFrameworks is fairly well known as a cross-platform open source coding toolkit, with a heavy emphasis on interaction. GitHub is an online community where creators have an opportunity to interact with others who are interested in building on their work, remixing it, or contributing in some other way. It was developed with open source software in mind, but people are starting to expand it to other kinds of tools and data—sharing DNA sequences, presets for commercial software, or novels in progress. Releasing code on GitHub is one of the ways I share my work.If money were no object, how would you change your current setup?
I think a lot of what I do happens because I’m interested in working with the few things I have. I’ve never owned a laser, so I haven’t made a laser line 3D scanner. But sometimes I have access to a projector, so I’ve built structured light 3D scanners (below) instead. A lot of my work has been about developing replacements for systems that most people can’t afford, and showing others how to build it: democratizing technology.That said, there are plenty of things I wish I could play with. I have a piece I want to make that requires a human-sized robotic arm. Another would require way more projectors than I’ve ever seen in a single room. I’d love to spend some time with a CT scanner. At the moment, I’m trying to solve a problem that has been keeping all four cores of my laptop occupied every night while I sleep—so access to a supercomputer would be great.What fantasy piece of technology would you like to see invented?
A screen that looks normal on one side, but is clear as glass when you look at it from the other side. A small, incredibly dense actuator that can deform into arbitrarily complex shapes—something on the order of a "pin art" toy, that fits in your hand, would be amazing. A camera with the ability to image continuously in the frequency domain at every pixel, perceiving not just red, green, and blue, but all the colors between and beyond. A free space holographic display that responds to lighting conditions, effectively becoming indistinguishable from the "real" environment. There are a ton of things I would like to see, and I’m excited that some of them are already the topic of intense academic research.Is there a piece of technology that changed your life or inspired you?
I’ll mention two, for different reasons: Processing and openFrameworks.Processing was the first environment I found that gave me permission to explore. Working with ActionScript before that, I always had this gut feeling that I was somehow "misusing" the tool, that I should really be making flashy websites (this was 2003). And QBasic before that just felt dismally anachronistic. With Processing, I felt like I was using a tool that was designed by people doing similar things, even though I didn’t know what to call it at the time.openFrameworks gave me something different. More than an environment or toolkit, openFrameworks is an incredible community that lives on the forums, via email lists, in comment threads, on IRC, in classrooms, and at real life meetups. This community regularly exchanges code, ideas, support, jobs, and endless inside jokes. While ActionScript got me started with open source (via people like Jared Tarbell) openFrameworks taught me what it means to share as part of a network of creators—to embed yourself in a community where sharing liberally is the norm. This practice of sharing is one of the few things that ties all my work together. More important than "what I do" is "how I do it": sharing everything, embedded in the context where it makes the most sense for that media.What’s your favorite relic piece of technology from your childhood?
Without a doubt, "Mario Paint" for the SNES. That was my first mouse, I still remember how weird it was to move this physical thing and have the virtual hand move along with it. I spent a lot of time using the composer to make weird music or I would transcribe sheet music I found around the house. It amazed me that all the information to make a recognizable song was contained in just those few marks, I just had to move it from the paper to the screen.
Kyle McDonald: I’m an artist with a background in philosophy and computer science, and a love for sound. Sometimes my work is more conceptual like keytweeter, where I auto-tweeted every 140 characters I typed for a whole year; or Only Everything Lasts Forever, which is a sound composition that contains all of the sounds we can distinguish as humans. Other times my work is more focused on interaction, whether it’s about new techniques for sensing in 3D, helping people see each other in new ways, or just getting people to dance.
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Because I work with code incessantly, I would be almost completely lost without a laptop. Beyond that, it changes a lot. Yesterday I was working with a Kinect and a Canon T2i. A couple weeks ago, it was an Arduino and some custom built piezoelectric drum triggers. Then a couple months ago I was surrounded by six Alienware machines, full of the latest NVIDIA graphics cards, running to twelve 1080p screens, using the heat from the computers to warm a chilly Brooklyn studio. So it really depends on the project. I try to keep only what I absolutely need, because I get ideas from everything—and I’m already overflowing with ideas, so having more stuff can just be distracting.What software do you use?
I’ve spent a lot of time with Max/MSP, Reason, and Live in the past—and Processing has been essential for almost a decade now. But the two most important pieces of software I’m using at the moment are GitHub and openFrameworks. openFrameworks is fairly well known as a cross-platform open source coding toolkit, with a heavy emphasis on interaction. GitHub is an online community where creators have an opportunity to interact with others who are interested in building on their work, remixing it, or contributing in some other way. It was developed with open source software in mind, but people are starting to expand it to other kinds of tools and data—sharing DNA sequences, presets for commercial software, or novels in progress. Releasing code on GitHub is one of the ways I share my work.
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I think a lot of what I do happens because I’m interested in working with the few things I have. I’ve never owned a laser, so I haven’t made a laser line 3D scanner. But sometimes I have access to a projector, so I’ve built structured light 3D scanners (below) instead. A lot of my work has been about developing replacements for systems that most people can’t afford, and showing others how to build it: democratizing technology.That said, there are plenty of things I wish I could play with. I have a piece I want to make that requires a human-sized robotic arm. Another would require way more projectors than I’ve ever seen in a single room. I’d love to spend some time with a CT scanner. At the moment, I’m trying to solve a problem that has been keeping all four cores of my laptop occupied every night while I sleep—so access to a supercomputer would be great.What fantasy piece of technology would you like to see invented?
A screen that looks normal on one side, but is clear as glass when you look at it from the other side. A small, incredibly dense actuator that can deform into arbitrarily complex shapes—something on the order of a "pin art" toy, that fits in your hand, would be amazing. A camera with the ability to image continuously in the frequency domain at every pixel, perceiving not just red, green, and blue, but all the colors between and beyond. A free space holographic display that responds to lighting conditions, effectively becoming indistinguishable from the "real" environment. There are a ton of things I would like to see, and I’m excited that some of them are already the topic of intense academic research.Is there a piece of technology that changed your life or inspired you?
I’ll mention two, for different reasons: Processing and openFrameworks.Processing was the first environment I found that gave me permission to explore. Working with ActionScript before that, I always had this gut feeling that I was somehow "misusing" the tool, that I should really be making flashy websites (this was 2003). And QBasic before that just felt dismally anachronistic. With Processing, I felt like I was using a tool that was designed by people doing similar things, even though I didn’t know what to call it at the time.openFrameworks gave me something different. More than an environment or toolkit, openFrameworks is an incredible community that lives on the forums, via email lists, in comment threads, on IRC, in classrooms, and at real life meetups. This community regularly exchanges code, ideas, support, jobs, and endless inside jokes. While ActionScript got me started with open source (via people like Jared Tarbell) openFrameworks taught me what it means to share as part of a network of creators—to embed yourself in a community where sharing liberally is the norm. This practice of sharing is one of the few things that ties all my work together. More important than "what I do" is "how I do it": sharing everything, embedded in the context where it makes the most sense for that media.What’s your favorite relic piece of technology from your childhood?
Without a doubt, "Mario Paint" for the SNES. That was my first mouse, I still remember how weird it was to move this physical thing and have the virtual hand move along with it. I spent a lot of time using the composer to make weird music or I would transcribe sheet music I found around the house. It amazed me that all the information to make a recognizable song was contained in just those few marks, I just had to move it from the paper to the screen.