frey // damian stewart

About Damian Stewart

Damian Stewart is an artist working with sound, code, light, and electronics. In his work he is interesting in creating senses of space that transcend the immediate physical environment of the viewer. His ideas come from a diverse background that includes musicianship as an improvising electroacoustic performer, time spent as a professional software programmer, and an education including elements of architecture and spatial design.

Installations

Using custom electronics and sensors combined with computers, Damian build installations using light and sound. Drawing on ideas of performance, Damian pursues the creation of beautiful work that engages with the audience at an intuitive level and invites a deep sense of freedom and of play. In building interactive pieces he is interested in blurring the lines between artist and audience, dissolving implicit hierarchies of artistic experience and elevating the audience to the level of artistic collaborator, even as he releases his grip as an artist on the specifics of audience experiences of his work.

→ Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound; → Wind

Music

Drawing on ten years of classical training and an additional five years of personal musical development, I compose and perform using a MIDI controller keyboard and software instruments developed in PureData. On stage the laptop usually lives behind me, out of the way; my entire performance is built up live using just the MIDI controller, which frees me to move my body expressively, and in so doing, forge a strong bond between myself as a performer and my audience.

→ video: waves to waves to waves with Chris Sugrue, AVLab 1.0, Medialab Prado, Madrid, September-October 2008; → video: solo live performance, 18th December 2007, Eindhoven, NL; → video: live with Pedro Boavida @ Sonic Scope 2007, Lisbon, PT; → Into the Wandering Wandering; → some of my compositions.

Code

I work closely with other artists to develop custom software, usually for interactive pieces. I am an expert C/C++ programmer with professional experience both in the Culture/Heritage sector developing computer-vision based interactive installations for museums, and in the computer games industry developing game titles for the Sony PlayStation2. But I am also an artist, and so I bring an artists' sensitivity toward the construction of the software that I make. Because of this I prefer to work in collaborative arrangements, where I can become more engaged in the conceptual development of the piece.

I know C/C++, OpenFrameworks, Java/Processing, PureData, Arduino/Wiring, HTML/CSS, PHP/Perl, MySQL, Lua, OpenGL, GLSL/HLSL; I have experience with computer vision and advanced 3D graphics programming with OpenGL including GLSL shader development.

→ Hand Tracking System