machine501.com

I am a programmer living in Los Angeles, California. I am the co-founder, along with my friend Tom Bray, of SearchCoders, a Rich Internet Applications consulting firm. We make stuff for Adobe, Fox Searchlight, Dell, and others. Our application, the SearchCoders/Dashboard, won the best community award at Adobe MAX 2007.

I studied Human-Computer Interaction at Stanford University, along with Film, Art, and Computer Science.

Before my interests became quite this pragmatic I was interested in exploring and developing novel user interfaces as digital sculptures. For example, while at Stanford I designed and created a dynamic sculpture titled "Stock Fountain". This was a fountain that varied its water level depending on the rate of change of the NYSE during its business hours and the Nikei Stock Index when the NYSE closed for the night. It was installed at the Stanford Department of Art and ran for several years.

I also designed and was awarded a grant for the Confession Wall, another digital sculpture that explored the interaction between anonymous confessions in the digital domain and voyeurism in the physical space. The system consisted of a website into which people could anonymously write confessions, which were then converted into speech, and a wall from which the confessions were played back. The wall changed the volume of its confessions based on the distance to the nearest visitor. As visitors approached the wall the confessions would turn into nearly inaudible whispers.