Thousands of LGBTQ+ artists died during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s and with them millions of paintings, photographs, songs, plays, dances and sculptures that will never be. Gene's Place is a sanctuary of sorts … a real and imagined facsimile of what an art space for many of that lost generation may have looked like.
This project is about Gene, the man, his history, the history around him and the space itself. In this VR experience you can freely roam, following Gene's voice through his 2000 sq. ft. downtown Manhattan loft while he reflects on that difficult period of life and love, the art he’s collected from artists of the time and tells stories from his 5 decades of life in New York.
The project documents and memorializes a crucial cultural space full of work by many queer artists before it is consumed by the inexorable march of gentrification.
A 1:1 recreation of my current physical room in Brooklyn, NY in VR. The ultimate desire for this project is to recreate this space digitally in a new physical location with the highest visual quality using photogrammetry. The end goal is to prove, or at least test, the value of experiencing uncanny reality in VR, by having users walk through my digital room in another digital space. I see the ability to truly virtualize reality as a massive next step for VR.
Sister Ray AR
Animating Gabriel Alcala’s drawn rendition for an interactive 3D experience of one Lou Reed’s masterpieces. Best enjoyed with sound!
Click the image for a demo or click here or the title for description and process of creation.
Converse Critique AR
What if we used AR to inform instead of to delight? This filter, created with LensStudio, tells Converse fans about abusive labor practices in Converse factories.
Using the Guardian's public API data, we mapped the location of Guardian US stories to settle a hypothesis about so-called pro-coastal reporting bias.
This short film created entirely in the Unreal Engine, uses Motion Capture Data recorded in Brooklyn to create narrative of invasion and uses comedy, in its movements, events and audio.
Created with Rockey Ke
In considering its obsolescence, we realized that the telephone is like poetry — a precursor, nearly forgotten today. From that exploration birthed our project, as a speculative manifestation of what place both a nearly obsolete medium and nearly obsolete transmitter could play in our current context.
Click the image, the title or click here for demo, description and process of creation.
A digital drawing game that prompts you with sketches to finish, Game Man, works similarly to an analog etch-a-sketch, using the two dials controls one can draw on the screen.
Click the image, the title or click here for demo, description and process of creation.
The Guru Avoids the Climate Crisis
As my first foray into 3D modeling and game engines, I used the Unreal Engine and Blender, to recreate a color-pencil drawing (bottom image in the left column) I made a few years ago in one of my more anxious, existential dread ridden, days.
Given the seeming inevitability of a global climate disaster, only complete ignorance makes it escapable … except every living thing is aware of changes. While ignorance is bliss, it’s impossible to not know about climate change etc. The Guru, who can meditate, the only activity that can fully clear your mind, is thus a symbol of privilege.
I used Polycam to lidar scan the wooden statuette of a person who is in a position that reads as both meditation and deep lamentation. I fixed holes in Blender before exporting him for Unreal, with which I created the world.