Speculative Design/Making
The Instrument for Outer Reasoning
Computational systems increasingly mediate everyday cognitive activity. Thinking is distributed across humans and machines through recommendation engines, reminders, and decision-support tools. This redistribution operates through convenience rather than loss, gradually positioning internal cognitive effort as friction. Actions once requiring deliberation are reframed as problems to be optimised.
The Instrument for Outer Reasoning is a portable computational device that materialises and interrogates this shift. Combining elements of cyberdecks and field instruments, it exposes computation as a visible, mechanical process through switches, cranks, and modular components. Rather than streamlining interaction, the device requires deliberate physical engagement, repositioning reasoning as effortful and embodied.
The project’s central intervention is to destabilise the assumed neutrality of cognitive extension. The device introduces friction, latency, and gradual degradation, becoming less reliable over time and forcing the user to renegotiate their dependence on it. In doing so, it models the point at which extension becomes substitution.
Rather than proposing a solution, the work operates as a speculative apparatus, translating abstract concerns about automation and cognitive atrophy into lived experience. Its focus lies in materialising cognition as an interface problem, making processes of thought visible, interruptible, and contingent.
The device is designed to be small and laptop-like in form, drawing on the aesthetics of medical monitoring equipment and cyberdeck culture rather than consumer technology. Stability is only ever maintained through interaction — as the user disengages, metrics deteriorate: attention decreases, memory drains, error rates rise, latency increases, and external reliance intensifies. The deterioration is continuous and mutual. Without interaction, the device fails completely.
The project challenges narratives of cognitive augmentation by positioning dependency as a structural outcome, rather than an individual failure. It positions users as responsible for sustaining systems that undermine their own cognition — simultaneously subject, operator, and caregiver. By treating cognition as measurable and managed rather than assumed internal capacity, the work exposes how care, optimisation, and control become entangled.
Grounded in automation theory, extended mind philosophy, and AI critique, the project situates cognitive reliance as a plausible outcome of existing trajectories. It does not ask whether such dependency will emerge, but what thinking remains possible once it does.
Graphics and Visuals
The Cut Up
The Cut Up is a real-time audiovisual piece built in TouchDesigner that draws on the cut-up technique pioneered by William S. Burroughs and the wider Beat Generation. The work treats language as raw material — fragmented, rearranged, and stripped of its original intent to produce new, unintended meaning.
A local custom LLM generates source text which is then passed through a sentiment analysis pipeline. Words are spliced and recombined based on affective weight, producing cut-up phrases that shift in tone — moving between the clinical and the poetic, the coherent and the fractured.
These phrases are overlaid onto brutalist archival footage shot on analogue, creating a tension between the organic grain of the image and the mechanical logic of the text. The result is a piece that is simultaneously authored and automatic — constructed and collapsed.
Pointcloud Test #7
Pointcloud Test #7 is a real-time interactive piece built in TouchDesigner that uses a live camera feed and depth perspective to drive a particle system. Under normal conditions the particles flow freely, but the user can interrupt and reshape that flow through physical presence — moving in front of the camera, slowing down, or covering the lens entirely.
When the camera is obscured or the scene goes still, the particles reorganise. They arrange themselves into distorted video imagery of a hill park — footage shot at a green space I return to frequently, away from the density of the city. The images bleed through the particle field in fragmented form, degraded and unstable.
The piece draws on surveillance culture and the feeling of being watched, compressed, and suffocated by urban environments. The act of covering the camera — an instinct toward privacy and refusal — is reframed here as a generative gesture: the moment of blocking becomes the condition for something else to emerge.
Creative Coding
This section spans a broad range of creative coding practice — from generative visuals and audiovisual systems to live coding, interactive media, and game audio. Working across environments including TouchDesigner, Processing, p5.js, Python, and browser-based tools, the work moves between real-time performance, installation, and composition. A constant thread is staying close to emerging tools and practices: treating new frameworks not as destinations but as materials to think with, break apart, and fold into an ongoing practice.
Live Music Coding
Strudel.cc is a browser-based live coding environment for music, built on the Tidal Cycles pattern language. It uses JavaScript to write and perform rhythmic and tonal patterns in real time — looping, transforming, and layering sound structures through code that executes as it is written.
Alongside live coding practice, I compose original music for games and interactive projects. This work spans ambient soundscapes, procedural audio design, and scored soundtracks — treating music as a dynamic layer of the work rather than an afterthought. The compositional approach carries across both contexts: pattern-based thinking, iterative structure, and sound that responds to or anticipates movement.
Generative Soundscapes
VCV Rack is an open-source modular synthesiser environment that simulates the hardware Eurorack format in software. Signal flow is built by patching virtual modules together — oscillators, filters, sequencers, random voltage sources — creating systems that can run, evolve, and surprise without direct intervention.
This approach informed the generative soundtrack for Katabis, a game built around unpredictable, user-guided experience. Rather than composing fixed music, the soundtrack is designed as a living system — responding to player behaviour, shifting in texture and density as the game state changes. Tension and release emerge from the patch itself, not from a score. The result sits somewhere between composition and accident, guided but never fully controlled.