top of page
food_map.jpg

The cycle of coffee production has been around since its popularity began to rise in the 17th and 18th century due to it being a drinkable alternative to tea or beer that was clean, unlike most water. 

Coffee begins as a bean on a coffee tree, most planted in large plantations in the Arabian peninsula or in Central & South America. Workers harvest the beans and spread them out to dry to a certain texture- the outer shell is removed around this time. Beans are then bagged and shipped to coffee houses & production centers where the beans are roasted and/or ground before being made into the cups of coffee we all love. 

Once coffee reaches its consumer-form, it essentially ensures the system remain open: there are no reusable parts from most consumer forms of coffee. The coffee industry has room to undergo serious sustainability efforts, but convenience is king!

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

sound_Perception.jpg

Our brains do an incredible job a sensing and perceiving sound- performing some tasks far better than any computer can. Our hearing abilities are a testament to our brain's ability to retain trace memories of oddly specific stimuli and record them in a vast library of sounds we've heard before. 

After the sound waves stimulate the structures in the inner ear, the sound is turned into a signal, which is sent immediately to the Pons & Cerebellum. Here, the more evolutionarily primitive portions of our brain analyze the signal for core aspects like any sort of predictability. It's then relayed to our amygdala, which interprets the signals historical (whether or not we've heard it before) and emotional context.

 

Only then is the signal sent to the auditory cortex, where more nuanced thoughts regarding the signal can be formed.  

History _of_RocknRoll .jpg

The history of Rock N' Roll is largely one of appropriation and marketing, spurred along by the creative genius of a select few artists and songwriters that laid the groundwork for the Rock Era to come. 

In general it is accepted that the earliest facets of rock originate in 'Roots' music: a combination of hymns and working songs that borrowed from African rhythms and was disseminated by slaves and the African American community that followed. As well, Tin Pan Alley- the earliest vestige of Folk and Pop music, helped prop up a busy and thriving music scene in New York. 

Rather quickly, these musical forms took on a life of their own, becoming the framework for massive genres to come like Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Pop, and Folk. Artists from these genres brought the US music scene to where it is now, cultivating classic tunes, records, and melodies whose traces are found in just about every current popular song. 

Only with the introduction of Country & Western and R&B music didd those mainstream genres begin to offer more wiggle room, and with the spur of a quickly-developing postwar US culture, youth had the time and resources to fall head over heals for the biggest names of their era: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Buddy Holly, and many more. 

Through NetLogo I tried to simulate market penetration by large corporations in a market previously saturated by small business. 

The larger corporations are signified by the red turtle, which grows upon consuming a small business. Large corps. gain a lot of energy from exchange, but reproduce rarely- as they would behave normally in a market. 

The market share can only be occupied by a maximum of 10 large corporations (an arbitrary number selected for visual purposes of this simulation), however if the number of large corps exceeds 10, the market becomes a shared monopoly and the small business are driven out. 

The limits of this simulation are that it does not accurately depict how large corps. engage in predation of one another, nor does it accurately simulate that large corps. actively consume in the same way small businesses do.  

For this system, I wanted a more tongue-in-cheek interpretation of weather systems and decided to annotate a quick .gif of a weather system to appropriately label it according to my day. 

Different things throughout the day affect my mood, much of them out of my control in the same way the weather is. Often the best thing to do is learn to weather the storm rather than trying to predict the weather. The same may be true of our everyday lives. 

This is intended to be humorous and not an actual depiction of the causes and behavior of weather systems. 

global_drug_industry.jpg

Only in the last decade or so have we gotten a clearer picture of the global trade of drugs that has developed since the earliest days of globalism. Internationally, countries are more connected than we have ever been before. 

Inspired by a VICE documentary on the subject, I tried to visually represent the interconnected schema that they investigated. It is no longer the case that drugs have a single country of origin, many countries have become hotspots for a variety of drug productions, especially in South and Central America. 

Europe, North Africa, and the US play massive roles in drug consumption and make up the vast majority of the demand on the global marketplace. Despite policing and enforcement efforts, large scale systematic production and distribution pathways have established themselves all over the world. 

Below is an in-depth exploration of the history of Rock N' Roll, its earliest influences, and its modern manifestations. The tree is organized phylogenetically, in the same way the branches of the evolutionary tree show how closely related certain aspects are. The earliest influences are around the upper parts of the tree: Folk, Jazz, and Blues. 

Next to each leaf of the tree is a bell. The bell is linked to a YouTube video of an archetypical example of each of the subgenres. In each of the videos, I tried to find live performance footage or footage that showed the artist in some kind of way. The resulting archive of music is incredibly eclectic: everything is included from ODJB, Elvis Presley, & The Killers. 

To create the tree I used a browser-based software called iTOP that allows you to create a phylogenetic tree simulation using any data inputs that you would like. Using the interactive elements that WiX provides you with, I created a way to interact with the tree to listne to samples of each different genre. 

HistoryofRock.png

Final Project:

ad

Dynamic MIDI Controller Gloves for use with Ableton LIVE

Final project documentation included 

bottom of page