Creative Technology Field Notes

By Mike Subelsky

A podcast about the creative technology industry, exploring the nexus of art, design, and engineering... more

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FAQs about Creative Technology Field Notes:

How many episodes does Creative Technology Field Notes have?

The podcast currently has 5 episodes available.

Creative Technology Field Notes episodes:

March 26, 2026Humor, Failure, and the Art of Subversion with Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Overview
Jonah Brucker-Cohen has
spent over two decades turning familiar systems into subversive art. His
method: take something everyone uses (a mailing list, a crosswalk
button, a login screen) and break it in a way that makes you laugh, then
think.
Jonah walks through several recent projects that use public data to
expose invisible urban realities, such as a crosswalk timer that delays
your crossing based on the street’s accident history, a weather system
that shows how temperature maps to neighborhood wealth, and a GPS app
that routes you through the most dangerous parts of a city. Each one
takes data we already have and reframes it as something you physically
experience.
We discuss the origin story of the Scrapyard Challenge, a
workshop series Jonah co-founded with Katherine Moriwaki in Dublin in 2003.
Jonah and Katherine taught non-engineers how to build sound controllers
and interfaces out of junk. Their key finding: people with zero
electronics experience took the biggest risks and made the most
interesting things.
The conversation closes with Jonah’s philosophy on what makes
interactive art work: it should be immediately understandable, without a
long artist statement required. He points to Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine
as a model for that clarity: crank it for an hour and it dispenses
exactly minimum wage in pennies.
Bio
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an artist, researcher, and Associate Professor
of Digital Media and Networked Culture at Lehman College (CUNY). His
interactive works have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, Ars
Electronica, Tate Modern, MoMA, and Transmediale, among others.
He was recently interviewed about projects that address artificial intelligence
on the AI Futures for Art and Design
podcast.
Chapter Markers
[00:00:00] — Introduction and overview of Jonah’s work
[00:01:03] — How frustration with static art led to combining
technology and art practice
[00:03:21] — The appeal of failure modes and subverting systems
[00:04:24] — Infinite Factor Authentication: spoofing security
culture
[00:06:15] — Crossing Algorithm: a crosswalk that knows its street’s
history
[00:07:53] — Unequal Weather: mapping temperature to socioeconomic
reality
[00:09:11] — Killer Route: a GPS app that routes through danger
[00:10:38] — Why humor works as an entry point for critical art
[00:11:37] — Scrapyard Challenge: building with junk
[00:16:00] — Alerting Infrastructure: the jackhammer that museums
invite to destroy them
[00:18:02] — Average Citizen: a chair that counts down public
waiting times
[00:20:00] — Favorite projects: Bump List, feedback loops, and
cybernetics
[00:22:06] — Mike subverts his own podcast tools
[00:23:01] — Advice for artists who want to critically examine
technology
Resources Discussed
Neural — art and technology
publication
Rhizome — digital art and
culture
Creative
Applications — creative technology projects
Contact
coin-operated.com
...more
27min
February 24, 2026Light, Code, and Improvisation with Manuel Palenque
Manuel Palenque shares
how he got his start building projection mapping systems when the
technology was brand new, what it’s like to
design content for dome projections, and why the technical constraints
of light and contrast matter more than most people realize. He talks
about how AI tools like GitHub Copilot have expanded his ability to work
across platforms like Unity, Unreal Engine, and web-based 3D, and
explains his philosophy of using AI to build tools rather than generate
results. Manuel also discusses his work with the
DATARAIZ lab, where he and his
collaborators are rebuilding the spirit of hacker spaces and open-source
communities to bridge art and engineering. The episode closes with the
story of one of his favorite projects: a light installation on a
powerline tower that has been standing and evolving for over 14
years.
Topics Covered
Getting started with creative technology: Learning
vvvv, building custom systems for
audiovisual performances, and riding the early wave of projection
mapping
AI as a tool-builder, not a result-generator: Using
GitHub Copilot and VS Code to unlock platforms like Unity, Unreal
Engine, and THREE.js for web-based VR
and AR, and building tools rather than just generating images and video
Live performance and the thrill of pressing the
button: Why Manuel gravitates toward live events where the show
depends on systems he built, and the balance between engineering and
improvisation
Dome projections: The technical challenges of
contrast and brightness, designing for exploratory
vs. fixed-point-of-view experiences, and creating a real-time collective
interactive dome installation where audience members controlled visuals
via QR codes on their phones
The Buzludzha
Monument: How an abandoned brutalist communist-era dome
building in Bulgaria inspired Manuel’s artistic work
Projection mapping a building: Logistics of light
contamination, why abstract content and forced perspective work better
than narrative characters, and why projector power is the biggest
constraint
Festival vs. public audiences: How attention span,
client expectations, and narrative length shift depending on the
setting
Working with tech companies: Why even tech-savvy
clients are still surprised by creative technology: “people haven’t seen
it all”
DATARAIZ lab: A Buenos Aires initiative rebuilding
the hacker space spirit, bridging artists and engineers, and running
workshops on interactive technology and dance
Teaching immersive technology to dancers: Helping
non-technical creators understand what’s possible with motion tracking,
projection, and sensors
The case for “less” in immersive tech: Using
immersive experiences to get people off their phones and into shared,
real-life interactions
Tecnópolis powerline tower: The Coloso at Tecnópolis project,
built on a power line tower that has been standing
for 14+ years
Guest Bio
Manuel Palenque
is a creative technologist and visual artist with over 15 years of
experience specializing in immersive audiovisual experiences and
interactive installations around the world. He has taught at
universities and cultural institutions worldwide, and has led projects
in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Berlin, and the United States.
...more
33min
February 05, 2026Double Take Moments: Designing for Surprise with Josh Corn
Josh Corn traces his path from architecture and theater consulting
into experience design, and how that background shapes the way he builds
physical, interactive systems. He explains why he tends to describe
himself as an “experience designer,” and how he thinks about technology
as a means to shape behavior, attention, and feeling rather than as a
deliverable by itself.
We focus on the practical side of building real-world installations:
working early with architects, defining spatial and operational
requirements (access, storage, serviceability), and coordinating with
contractors and outside vendors when fabrication needs to happen at
scale. Josh uses The Sloomoo Institute as an example of how interactive
environments get translated into mechanisms, workflows, and maintenance
plans-and why those constraints have to be treated as first-class design
inputs.
Josh also talks about teaching physical making (3D printing, laser
cutting, machining, casting) and what he looks for when students
prototype. He describes where AI tools and LLMs help (ideation, quick
visualization) and where they mislead (mechanical plausibility,
“renderings” that imply mechanisms that can’t work). The conversation
closes by connecting his design practice to stage magic and to research
on “wonder”, including how “double take” moments can be designed
intentionally.
Bio
Josh Corn is an experience designer and creative technologist with a
background in architecture, theater design/consulting, industrial
design, and electrical engineering. He runs Double Take Labs, where he
develops physical, interactive installations, often in collaboration with
architects, contractors, and specialized vendors. He also teaches
hands-on making and prototyping, and draws on stage-magic principles to
shape audience perception and attention.
Books
Hiding the
Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to
Disappear
Wonder,
the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences
Contact
Website
Email
...more
29min
February 04, 2026Human Scale: An Architect’s Path to VR with Aishwarya Balagopal
Aishwarya Balagopal traces her path from architecture into creative
technology, starting with an early fascination for how people move
through (and feel inside) spaces. After growing up in Mumbai and later
studying façade design at the University of Southern California, she
talks about how “human factors” in the built environment—scale, light,
material, and perception—became the foundation for how she now thinks
about immersive experiences.
From there, the conversation follows her pivot into UX and then XR/VR
during the COVID era, when she wanted a creative outlet that still
aligned with her strengths as a spatial thinker. She breaks down why
architecture skills can translate well to immersive design: comfort with 3D
thinking, attention to proportion and sightlines, and a habit of
designing for real-world constraints. She also shares lessons from
building XR work for cultural and museum contexts, where storytelling,
accessibility, and “presence” matter as much as polish.
The second half goes deep on VR as a practical learning medium.
Aishwarya discusses her work with Virtual Apprentice on workforce
training—especially scenarios where embodied practice and repetition
matter (e.g., interpersonal dynamics and procedural training). She also
describes a research-driven project focused on
helping students with autism learn engineering concepts, and how that
thread led her toward building her own VR learning tool aimed at
supporting students with learning challenges.
Bio
Aishwarya Balagopal is the founder of Edlyxr and
a VR product designer and creative
technologist with a background in architecture and spatial design. Her
work spans immersive learning and training experiences, including VR
workforce education and museum-focused XR projects, and she brings an
architect’s attention to human perception, scale, and environment into
the design of 3D interfaces.
Links
Edlyxr
Virtual
Apprentice
The Poe Museum
Museum of Science
Fiction
Contact
LinkedIn
...more
34min
February 03, 2026Stage Crew Engineering with Pete Doherty
Pete Doherty
unpacks the behind-the-scenes work that enables experiential projects to run.
Pete frames creative technology as experience-making:
building the kind of systems that power museum installs, gallery pieces, location-based entertainment, and other tech-enabled environments where the audience
is meant to feel something.
From there, Pete shares a high-stakes red-carpet build with Fake
Love: a wall of Windows hybrid devices used to showcase
fan-submitted “light side / dark side” performances at the debut of Star
Wars: The Force Awakens. The conversation highlights what success
looks like in these moments: coordinated playback across a fleet of
devices, networking reliability under pressure, and the practical
reality that creative ambition often depends on careful operational
engineering.
Pete then describes an ambitious multi-vendor integration:
the Meta Store (circa 2020), built as a physical showcase for
metaverse product demos at Meta’s Burlingame campus. We revisit
the “stage crew engineering” theme: DevOps for reproducibility and
recovery and using infrastructure-as-code to rebuild quickly.
The episode closes with a peek into Pete’s
prototyping preferences (Elm and its fork Gren) and candid notes on
where AI coding tools help, and where niche stacks still stump them.
Links
Pete’s website and case studies,
including the red carpet wall
Creative
Tech Tips and Tricks
Pete’s
LinkedIn
Terraform and
Terragrunt
Elm and Gren
...more
28min

FAQs about Creative Technology Field Notes:

How many episodes does Creative Technology Field Notes have?

The podcast currently has 5 episodes available.