i am toby, i do stuff. largely in london, mostly in front of a mac, and rarely not exploring digital media in some way. i have an alter-ego, *spark, and an artist’s statement that ties the two together:
a digital media maverick, i cross the disciplines of artist, designer and engineer in the pursuit of anything that uses media to make people interact or think in unexpected ways. i am particularly interested in what cinema can become, performing improvised ‘live cinema’ pieces and developing audience-led interactive story-telling environments. i was also the vj in the ‘ford vj experience’, which dominated uk event industry awards in 2007, turning motor-show messaging on its head by making the screens be about the people buying the cars rather than the cars themselves. comfortable both with devolved community based projects and focussed commercial work, i have worked under my artist moniker *spark and as part of other forward-looking organisations such as imagination, yeast culture, the light surgeons and d-fuse.
to pick that apart
* i graduated as a mechanical engineer, but somehow managed to investigate augemented reality and art galleries under the guise of ergonomics for my final year project.
* i found my calling studying product design at masters level, where i could take a blue sky approach to humanising technology and work at a systems and environment level. that has really come into its own since, with user-experience design and interactive environments de rigeur nowadays.
* my sideline as a vj became consuming as the enabling technologies really took off, and i found myself living as an artist pushing the possibilities of what could be done in that exploding space: this is where *spark was born.
* narrative and meaning became increasingly important in my live ‘video fused motion graphics’ and i found a clear direction in fusing cinema, vj tools and performance, which nowadays has the moniker ‘live cinema’. there’s a lot of interesting things in that territory, ranging from individuals re-channelling the oral storyteller tradition to whole industries in a post-broadcast world.
* off the back of the live cinema innovations and a display of design sensibility, all of this came together in the ford vj project, a mighty achievement that laughed in the face of the ‘never innovate in all areas at the same time’ maxim. imagination deserve much praise for coming at it with such a coherent and laudable rationale, and i may be biased, but i’ve yet to see a commercial project which leverages the potential of vjing in such a comprehensive way. with the stakes high, time short and uncharted territory for all involved, it was character forming, a massive learning experience, and an experience i’ll never forget.
* from corporate to the far extreme of concept, kinetxt was born to explore the potential of user generated content, interactive environments, mass participation, custom code and more: its an experiment to invert cinema, replacing the director’s vision with an emergent property of the audience. this has been in conjunction with friends novak, and its interesting stuff, and with lots of applications both cultural and commercial.
* i also was one of the founders of a peer-to-peer arts organisation to promote vjing that held festivals worldwide and received significant arts council funding for two uk festival and symposiums. its taught me a lot about myself, the nature of progress, and without wishing to sound trite, how the hard things can often be easy and the trivial things can consume and derail far too easily. while we’re at it, in belbin-speak, i’d like to be a plant but i’m more a resource locator.
* in skills and knowledge, i’m currently focussed on software development as the key to realising my artistic desires as well as facilitating stimulating commercial work. i am expert in quartz composer, the node-based realtime graphics programming environment built into mac osx, and increasingly experienced in application development leveraging quartz composer along with quicktime, opengl, and the richness of osx’s cocoa frameworks. i’m also expert at mac osx system administration, which goes hand in hand with delivering software as a product rather than download.
* rounding the production skillset off, i’m more than conversant with final cut studio and adobe creative suite, likewise happy with a camera in my hand.
* you can check out an expanding selection of my work through the projects section, and i have a vimeo account with the oeuvre uploaded.
* i also keep a diary of sorts on this site. useful for documenting life and projects as they develop, it now means i can link you to some of the work i’ve done for those organisations: imagination, yeast culture, the light surgeons and d-fuse.
reading this with a project in mind? underlying all my achievements is a background in problem solving and user-experience design that allows my creative and technically savvy nature to flourish. i’m available for freelance and contract positions, and in short, I’m the kind of person who you can ask to run with something, so get in touch: the contact is at the bottom of every page.