Jerald: Hey Brandon, thanks for doing this very informal interview. To start, could you describe your background and experience with computational art or any related fields?

Brandon: Okay, yeah. I’ve been in this space for around 15 years. I started from the underground club scene, doing visuals, projection mapping, real-time graphics, things like that. Then I spent some time working with other artists, enabling the technical aspects of their work. I learned a lot from that process and tried to figure out what my own practice would be like.

Between that, I was also teaching for a bit, doing that kind of work. Throughout this process, I’ve always been interested in new media, computational art, and the potential of new technologies to say something specific about the times, culture, or history. I think that’s been my journey so far.

Jerald: Thanks for sharing. Do you mind saying a bit more about the types of artists you collaborated with, and what kinds of aspects of their ideas or work you helped bring to life?

Brandon: I think my longest collaboration was with the artist Choy Ka Fai. He’s an artist who works with dance. When you think about dance and technology, they seem quite separate, but in our collaboration it all came together. I did a lot of motion tracking work for him, real-time game engine work with Unity, and other related things.

I’ve also been working with a musician, Hulubalang, and we do a lot of interrogation of archival images — reinterpreting them through AI to examine biases, both in the colonial image and in the training data itself, and how synthetic images interpret those biases. Those have been my two longer collaborations.

Jerald: Do you have any specific or broad hopes for this program, and for your time and contributions as part of it?

Brandon: I think what’s important in developing a media art scene, or a scene based on art and technology, is the ability to archive. There have been many initiatives over the past years that have disappeared. My hope for this project is that it maintains a consistent archive — of things that have happened before, things happening now, and hopefully things happening in the future.

My hope is that these kinds of practices, the people, and the projects are all archived and preserved in some way.

Jerald: Do you have any specific ideas about how that archival process, or the archive itself, should look like?

Brandon: There are a lot of models you can look at. Ars Electronica is one model. The Internet Archive has its own arts initiative, as do Electronic Arts Intermix and Transmediale. There are many long-running institutions dedicated to the history and practice of art and its intersection with technology.

So it could be something like those platforms, or something completely new. The important thing is for us, as participants in this scene, to think of new ways — while also looking at precedents.

Jerald: Could you tell us a bit more about your upcoming workshop?

Brandon: For my upcoming workshop, I took the prompt of working with different technologies and bringing them together — especially looking at generativity, both in the classical sense of computational generativity and in the way we use it now, as generative AI. The idea is to bridge these two terms as different forms of language.

Practically, I’m going to work with TouchDesigner as a framing exercise — transferring outputs from that process into a generative AI process. I’m planning to create generative, procedural flowers in TouchDesigner and translate that into something like in ComfyUI, to see how different programs interpret and translate forms differently.

Jerald: Looking forward to that. Could you say a bit about how your work intersects with Flora’s?

Brandon: Me and Flora are close friends; we’ve known each other for a while. Our work intersects in that we’re both interested in the framework of worlding, world-building and world-weaving. The idea of world-building has been around for a while, but recently there’s this idea of worlding, from the artist Ian Cheng, who talks about the democratic process of individual creators — not necessarily geniuses — creating new worlds. That’s where I’m at right now: using all these tools to create new worlds.

Where Flora’s work intersects with mine is that she’s designing decentralized tools for world-building, so even the tools used to create worlds are decentralized. For example, I use software like Blender, Unreal Engine, or Unity — all relatively democratic programs, but each with its own approach. Flora’s work, though, is a completely different model. She’s making world-building software, frameworks, and platforms not centered around a single technology like game engines or 3D modeling. It’s quite interesting to see where the future of this might go.

Jerald: Lastly, could you speak a bit about why you think it’s important to build communities and platforms for computational art?

Brandon: I think it’s important to build communities overall. Everyone needs a community. But it’s also important to think about communities that can sustain and remember — which is why I think archival is the most important aspect of this.