Kyle McDonald

Selected Work

ExR3

Inbox Zero Residency

2013 A one-week residency aimed at clearing my inbox, treating email answering as art, daily digital life as readymade performance. Daily reports on Twitter, supported by GaOk in Seoul.
ExR3

ExR3

2013 with Elliot Woods An anamorphic analog interactive installation that exists coherently in a fractured, mirrored version of a reflected room visible from four points within the real space.
Missing

Missing

2012 with The xx, Matt Mets and Aramique 50 robotic speakers turn to face visitors, while a spatialized recording of The xx's song "Missing" follows them through the space.
Mother

Mother

2012 with Inmi Lee Digitally extruding hand gestures in response to linguistic cues as a method of experimental sound visualization.
Blind Self Portrait

Blind Self Portrait

2012 with Matt Mets While the visitor keeps their eyes shut, a moving platform guides a pen in their hand to draw a self-portrait, using computer vision to track their face and generate a line drawing. The result is a machine-aided drawing, a self-portrait you could never draw.
subpixel

subpixel

2012 A subway advertisement upgrade kit, built from laser-cut acrylic, rubber bands, and nine razor blades. It transforms a small patch of subway advertisement into an 8×8 grid of pixel stickers, ready for interaction with the public.
ScratchML

ScratchML

2012- with Jamie Wilkinson and Michael Auger A format for describing turntablism, as well as tools for recording, analyzing, sharing, and even recreating scratch performances with giant robot arms. Initially built as a prototype in at the 319 Scholes Art Hack Day.
Shadowplay

Shadowplay

2011- Experiments with shadow manipulation as an alternative interaction paradigm, exploring the unexpected results of structure in shadow, or form in emptiness. Shadowplay uses ProCamToolkit which was co-developed by the YCAM Interlab during a residency.
mapamok

mapamok

2011- An experimental projection mapping tool that minimizes the amount of time spent doing calibration. mapamok uses ProCamToolkit which was co-developed by the YCAM Interlab during a residency.
Face Substitution Research

Face Substitution Research

2011-, with Arturo Castro Real time face tracking and substitution experiments including a realization of the Scramble Suit and an interactive installation Faces that picks a new face for you every time you blink.
Pocket Topographies

Pocket Topographies

2011-, with Chris Woebken Ongoing experiments with pocket-sized topographical maps for visualizing geographic data in a physical form. The first piece shows a year of travel around NYC captured surreptitiously by an iPhone. Started during a residency at MakerBot.
People Staring at Computers

People Staring at Computers

2011 A photographic intervention. Custom app installed around NYC computer stores, taking a picture each minute and uploading it. Photos exhibited on site, full screen, on every computer.
Sharing Interviews

Sharing Interviews

2011 Interview series about creators sharing work, with an emphasis on open source, media art, and digital communities. The interviews are conducted with EtherPad and stored on GitHub.
EletroAxé

EletroAxé

2011, with Lucas Werthein Experimental percussion interface for Brazilian musician/composer Carlinhos Brown. Performed for a crowd of 50k during the 2011 Carnaval in Salvador, Bahia.
The Janus Machine

The Janus Machine

2010, with Zach Lieberman, Theo Watson and Daito Manabe A 3d photo booth built from a structured light system. Janus is often depicted with two faces, each facing in opposite directions. Here: the real face, and the scan stored by the computer.
Only Everything Lasts Forever

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

...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

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

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

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

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 scanner

DIY 3D Scanning

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nandhopper

2008- Ongoing noise synth explorations, with inspiration from the Kraakdoos, Theremin, Thingamakit, and BEAM electronics.
diy 3d interface

DIY 3D Interface

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

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

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

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

Empathy

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

Bio

Kyle McDonald

is a media artist who works with code, with a background in philosophy and computer science. He creates intricate systems with playful realizations, sharing the source and challenging others to create and contribute. Kyle is a regular collaborator on arts-engineering initiatives such as openFrameworks, having developed a number of extensions which provide connectivity to powerful image processing and computer vision libraries. For the past few years, Kyle has applied these techniques to problems in 3D sensing, for interaction and visualization, starting with structured light techniques, and later the Kinect. Kyle's work ranges from hyper-formal glitch experiments to tactical and interrogative installations and performance. He was recently Guest Researcher in residence at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan, and is currently adjunct professor at ITP.

Collaborators

Other Work