It has been a VERY long time since the site was updated. Who would have thought that having kids would be so time consuming! Well, once my wife and I got the hang of it, we decided to go and have another! So our home is now four, with our daughter born this past winter.
Fortunately, as child rearing began to make a little more sense, I was able to get back to creating and working with media again. I also have taken a position at Eastern Connecticut State University, a small state-run liberal arts college in Connecticut with an AMAZING brand new fine arts building. I am currently the Media Technology Specialist for the Fine Arts Instructional Center (FAIC) at Eastern, where I maintain all media systems in the building, including the the state-of-the-art audio-visual systems for our Art Gallery, Studio/Black Box Theater, Proscenium Thrust Theater, and our Concert Hall. I also am heavily involved with the New Media Studies program, teaching classes in Sound Art, Media Programming, and Music Audio Production. I will also be serving as interim Program Coordinator for the Fall 2018 semester while my colleague Kristen Morgan is on sabbatical leave.
Along with my technician and teaching work at Eastern, I have also had the opportunity to do some major creative work at the school. I have collaborated twice with Kristen Morgan in the development of audio-reactive projected visuals for performances by Okon Hwang’s SOY Trio. I also took on the role as sound designer and composer for the original devised performance piece Thread City, directed by Alycia Bright-Holland and Kristen Morgan.
Thread City was a large scale main-stage performance that tells the story of the immigrant experience, in particular that of Willimantic, CT. The story was told entirely through body movement, projected imagery (using BOTH of our projection servers, including our brand new Pandora’s Box 4-output server), sound design, and music. The sound design consisted of scenic soundscapes, recordings of machinery from the Windham Textile Music, and experimental multi-channel fixed media passages. Musically the score was blending of my interpretations of the folk musics of the immigrant populations of Willimantic, American traditional music, American minimalism, and experimental music. I performed the entire score live for each performance on acoustic guitar, banjo, and laptop via Ableton Live. The experience was incredibly rewarding and was well received, where my score won a 2018 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Region 1 Merit Award in Excellence in Original Music Composition. I hope to have a finished fixed recording of the score for distribution by the end of the summer.
I have a very busy summer planned for compositional and programming output, hoping to finish at least 2 major compositions, as well as beginning the mass migration of my media programming work over to GitHub. This site will continue to be the primary location for updates and the sharing of new works!