Jeffrey Crouse

jeffcrouse info

Bio

EDUCATION

Georgia Institute of Technology, Information Design and Technology
MS in Information Design and Technology, May 2006 with GPA of 3.9
Awarded "Most Outstanding Thesis" in the IDT program

New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
BA in Individualized Study, with foci of CS and Fiction Writing, May 2003 with GPA of 3.6

Projects

FeedBlast is an experiment in directed generative video. It takes the form of a web-based application that creates an audiovisual mashup of web content using items from a collection of RSS feeds.

Earthify takes a page of Craigslist posts and maps them on Google Earth.

Conceived by David Jimison and funded by the mtvU Digital Incubator, H!t or Sh!t (H!/S!) is a social network media player for use on computers and cell phones. Through H!/S! users can pass along media that is pertinent to their styles and tastes, forming various networks of like minded people. I will collaborate with David Jimison on the high-level design, and implement the entire back end.

Interactive Frank is an audio montage generator that constructs a story using a constrained writing technique similar to the "n-gram" and text found all over the web. The story is read aloud using an online text-to-speech service, and the program analyzes the text to find an appropriate live audio stream which plays in the background. It was built using the Switchboard library.

In ChinASCII, the player takes on the role of Charles Bukowski's alter ego, Chinaski, and must work to keep the balance between his love life, his work life, and his leisure time that led Bukowski to create the gritty poetry for which he is known. I created the engine and the "Love" game. This was a joint project.

Built on the infrastructure developed by the ABL/UT project, DOTCOM is a game in the tradition of the interactive drama, Facade. In the setting of a late nineties startup Internet company, the player must interact with coworkers in order to make decisions that will influence the success of the company, as well as how well he or she comes out in the end when the company goes public - or goes bust. I worked as a character programmer while earning my masters degree at Georgia Tech.

Operation Clyde is a multi player game which utilizes cell phones as the control device. The game provides a local shared area for people to join together and play. In Operation Clyde, players control ghosts using the number pad on their cell phone, by calling into one of the game's phone numbers.

A 3D vector-style Java game in which the user must capture several flags before the enemy birds can take them away. PixelTrainer is entirely procedural - no static assets are used.

Witness is a screensaver that reflects the changing status of criminals, from living to dead. It updates itself daily with information provided to the public over the internet by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Conferences and Workshops

An unconventional network of creators, workers, musicians, organizations, artists, activists, producers and organizers are collectively waging asymmetrical warfare on the established systems of control in our cultural, political and art worlds. I will present at Versionfest as part of the Eyebeam Road Show to talk about my work at Eyebeam.

An international graduate student conference dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of digital technologies and their impact on art, culture, science, commerce, society, and the environment. I was invited to the conference to present my masters thesis, "Switchboard: A Real-time Art Toolkit."

A one week collaborative workshop led by main developers of the environment Casey Reas and Ben Fry, along with Marius Watz and Zachary Lieberman. At the workshop, I created a sound-responsive text visualization that built upon my Switchboard library.

Research

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. As a production fellow at Eyebeam, I am researching several projects dealing with the expressive and generative potential of web technologies.

Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation? This research is collected in the companion document to my masters thesis, which was awarded most outstanding thesis in my graduating class.

The Mobile Technologies Group is a research group focused on exploring the social impact of current and next generation mobile technologies. Current research interests include pervasive gaming, digital meta-tagging, storytelling, and social networking. While at MTG, I worked on Operation Clyde, and also assisted in the design of other projects.

In this interdisciplinary lab, computer scientists, designers and artists work together to push the boundaries of existing genres and create new genres of electronic games. While at the EGL, I worked primarily on DOTCOM (described above).

Radical Software Group is a loosely defined ensemble of artists and programmers, working collaboratively in digital media. Radical Software Group has focused on network environments and interface design, including the award-winning software tool Carnivore. As the first RSG intern, my responsibilities included creating the first Carnivore Flash template, and working on the OS X version of Carnivore PE.