Kyle McDonald

Only Everything Lasts Forever

2008-2010 Very long sound composition for MP3: an arrangement of every sound we can uniqely distinguish. An exploration of noise and emptiness, and the auditory implications of sound representation. An open source project towards an MFA.

...and Counting

2010, for Wafaa Bilal Visualization for a full-back tattoo, one dot for each death associated with the war in Iraq: 4k US soldiers in red ink, 100k "invisible" civilians in ultraviolet.

Lagoglyphs

2010, with Shawn Lawson for Eduardo Kac Flocking of 1400 unique handmade drawings, with an emphasis on the generative mutability of writing. A version of the source was branched, and shared as "Clouds are Looming".

Night Lights

2009 Building projection with crowd interaction in collaboration with YesYesNo, featuring three different interaction modes over six different scenes, cycled every hour over five nights in Auckland, NZ.

keytweeter

2009 One-year performance for custom keylogger, tweeting every 140 characters I type, ending June 30, 2010. An exploration of the boundary between "information" and "control", ubiquitous status updates, and personal identity.

Portrait Machine

2009, with Theo Watson An interactive photography installation that visualizes the connections between visitors, reminding us of our connectedness and uniqueness, creating strong visual patterns and playful juxtapositions.

DIY 3D Scanning

2009- Ongoing work democratizing realtime 3D scanning with structured light (one projector, one camera).

1¢ Grants

2009 A project to provide 100 grants at 1¢ cent each. Suspended early due to the high overhead cost of mailing pennies.

Vibrobyte

2008-2009 The Vibrobyte is a wireless haptic interface specialized for co-located musical performance. It was featured in "Telemorphosis" at ICMC 2008. Technical details were presented at the 156th ASA Meeting and NIME 2009.

I Eat Beats

2008-2009 Skittle-based beat sequencer, a tangible and edible music interface. v2 implements a generic control surface with the aide of a linear polarizer to cancel out the screen.

pppd

2009 An appropriation of computability theory. During each brief scene, a random sequence of p'' code is generated and run, while the memory it uses is visualized and sonified. An investigation of emergent behavior and computational dreams.

Please Remember Me When I'm Gone

2008, with Rebecca Weisman Exploration of personality, death, and emptiness through a human-scale settlement of handmade dwellings combining video, electronics, and recorded voice. Colors from the sky as it moves from dusk to dark, and from dark to dawn, are sampled from video and routed into the huts.

Nandhopper

2008- Ongoing noise synth explorations, with inspiration from the Kraakdoos, Theremin, Thingamakit, and BEAM electronics.

DIY 3D Interface

2008- Ongoing work with DIY capacitive sensing for 3D interaction. v1 used an Arduino, aluminum foil, and six resistors.

Future Fragments

2008 An anti-time-capsule: quotes from seven fellow art students, transcribed phonetically and encoded as colors. Prints of these colors were carried by the artists for a summer. Decoded back into phonemes and re-formed into words, each text offers an indirect account of their respective journeys.

Musique Du Vent

2008 Reclaiming the entropy of unused dryer heat from a vent outside a freshman dorm, redirecting it into a discarded accordion. During the early Winter, the vent creates a small grassy space surrounded by snow. In March, it's mostly thick mud, but still unexpectedly warm and inviting.

Theremug

2007 An exercise in simplicity: the most basic capacitive sensor, using the smallest possible number of external components. Requires only an unshielded cable connected to a microphone input.

Empathy

2004 Early Processing work. Don't move too fast, you might scare it. Click to forgive and forget.