This site was designed and developed for artist Sarah Lee. The site is a custom theme built around the WordPress framework. This allows the artist to access and alter the content as they wish without changing the basic design. This particular theme has a built in image slideshow for each project, automatic thumbnails and built in Vimeo embedding.

Visit the site at: artsarahlee.com

This website/project was a collaboration with Lee Johnson, Rachel Klinghoffer and Benjamin Peterson as a way to memorialize 9/11 ten years later. More about the project here: thememoryproject.com. I worked with them to develop a way to pull random images from a tumblr feed and create a slideshow. This involved using JavaScript, jQuery, JSON and PHP.

Please visit the site at: thememoryproject.com

This website was created for my fellow Digital + Media colleagues to help promote our individual work and our show For Real held at the Tompkins Projects gallery in Brooklyn, NY. The site was hand coded from scratch using html, CSS, PHP and some jQuery. The site is at risddigitalmedia.com.

I am especially happy with jQuery slideshow and the rollover images that changes color each time the page is refreshed.

This program exploits that process. It compresses a video file endlessly allowing for interesting results.

Examples after the break

This program was created using Max/MSP and is able to run as an independent application. It allows for various levels of manipulation, from type of video compression, to frame rate control to oscillating dimensions from one generation to the next, a technique that widely varies the output.

Before

After 1000+ generations

This website was created to host my personal work. It was completely hand coded using hmtl, CSS, PHP, MySQL databases, ActionScript (Flash) and some jQuery. The whole site is actually one page that is completely re-generated by PHP each time the page is refreshed or a link is pressed, with the exception of the video pages. Those pages hold a blank Flash element that receives a variable from the PHP encoding in the address bar and plays the appropriate file. This allows me to upload any video to a folder and simply point the page to that video file name without having to change any ActionScript or html. The site is at: justinphillipson.com

A website that never loads.
Created using ActionScript and an exponential decay algorithm that slows the loading progress as it approaches 100%, never allowing it to reach. Check it out here.

This interactive sculpture interrupts any conversation in the vicinity in order to talk about itself. It politely apologizes and asks the viewer to continue what they were saying only to interrupt them again.

There are three main components to this project; a microphone (input), a  computer (processor), an audio speaker (output).

The project was pretty simple. Sounds in the area were captured by a cheap computer microphone embedded into the pedestal. When the sounds rose above a certain threshold, an audio track was played. When the sounds fell below that threshold, a second audio track was played.

All of the processing was done through a Max/MSP patch on a Mac Mini hidden inside the pedestal. The main audio speaker was connected to a small pre-amp that was stripped from an old set of computer speakers and then plugged into the Mac Mini’s headphone jack.

The pre-amp was needed to convert the relatively low power signal sent from the headphone jack to a much stronger signal that could power the large car audio speaker. The two audio tracks were created using a text to speech converter that produced a wav file that could be read by my Max/MSP patch. There are several free online text to speech converters. The one I used is here: http://www2.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php.

Click to see video documentation:

Problems:

The main problem I encountered was with a feedback loop between the microphone and the speaker. When the speaker was playing the first audio track, the microphone would pick it up and continue to trigger the first audio track, never allowing the second audio track to play or the piece to return to a silent state. It would get stuck in a loop that made its interactivity null. To remedy this, I did several things. First, I mounted the microphone in a position that faced away from the speaker and was semi-protected from the sound of the speaker by the face of the pedestal. This way sound waves from the speaker were only reaching the microphone indirectly. Second, I added insulation inside the pedestal to muffle the sound waves that were traveling through the interior of the pedestal. Finally, I fine tuned the threshold for the specific environment I was displaying the piece. The result worked fairly smoothly.

Another problem was in accessing the Mac Mini once it was installed within the pedestal. I solved this by using screen sharing between the Mac Mini and my laptop. This gave me access to everything the Mac Mini was doing. It allowed me to set precise thresholds and make tweaks to the code. It has since become my primary method for accessing computers running Max/MSP patches.

This project was one of my first using Max/MSP and I have since learned much better ways of working with the program.