My safecracking game from LACMA Halloween made an appearance at the December 2009 Mindshare event. It was installed on the rooftop of the Downtown Independent theater in Los Angeles with a great view of the skyline.
Since LACMA I re-engineered the door-release mechanism to be more powerful and reliable and it has worked like a charm since.The prize inside was a bowl of candycanes and mini Kit Kats and people enjoyed trying to crack it.

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Tagged:
Events, mindshare, safecracker ·
Sunday, December 20, 2009 ·

I used 40+ feet of Electroluminescent Wire leftover from halloween to create a glowing tree for some holiday ambience. Since EL Wire does not hold its shape very well I first made a skeleton of two inter-twined coils of multipurpose bendable wire supported by a central trunk. I was then able to attach the EL Wire and make a somewhat tree-like sculpture.

I also made a festive collar for my girlfriend’s dog using red LEDs. This serves the dual purpose of letting her join the holiday party in style and ensure she is visible if she wanders on the street at night.

She doesn’t seem to even notice it even with the hefty 9V battery taped in place. 
Tagged:
EL Wire ·
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I brought the laser project to King King in Hollywood for the Create Digital Music Lounge celebrating the 5th birthday of the blog. The event was a sort of after party for a two-day Ableton Live workshop sponsored by Dubspot out of NYC.
The event also featured a few performances by live-looping-beat-boxer Kid Beyond, including an in-depth look at how he uses foot pedals, MIDI and automation to control every aspect of his Ableton Live setup.

Aaron McLeran was there to demonstrate his Enso generative audiovisual system, now with iPhone OSC control!

Meason Wiley demonstrated his gestural music controller that uses lasers and photodiodes to sense the position of you hand and give you continuous control of your sound:

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Tagged:
Events, laser ·
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 ·

I was invited to show some projects at the LA County Museum of Art for their Muse Costume Ball, in conjunction with Mindshare Labs. We had an entire gallery in the Arts of America Building for the night and showed upwards of 15 interactive explorations.

I brought the Contours Laser Obelisk but also debuted a work-in-progress safecracking game called “Scrooge”.

“Scrooge” is a cabinet I built designed to look like a cartoony safe. It has a large dollar sign on top which serves as both a scoreboard for the game and an exagerrated symbol of the concept of a secure moneybox (a la Scrooge McDuck). The safe has both a front and back door that serves as the playing surface. Each player (red and blue) tries to open the safe by turning the dial to find the three unknown numbers in the combination. three LEDs on the door flash at varying speeds to indicate how close they are to the unknown number. The dollar sign on top shows lights for both players so everyone can see how close each player is to winning.
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Tagged:
Events, lacma, laser, mindshare, scrooge ·
Sunday, November 1, 2009 ·