I am a narrative designer, visual effects artist, and technical artist. I freelance in the film and games industries and consult startups on emerging technology. My two passions are storytelling and working with boundary-pushing technology.
My fascinations are ever-growing, but I have always loved exploring the emotions of dissimulation, bliss, and the duty of rites in and through a mythos of deep time, machine gods, and false worlds.
I am fascinated by the insight that our material culture is shaped by irrational mythologizing. We are never at the end of history. What mysterious belief systems will future people hold?
The two means of turning a story are action and revelation, and dissimulation is 'total' revelation, the total changing of how one sees the world.
Bliss is not simple joy. It is an overwhelming force, a tsunami of feeling that can change people, redirect their deepest desires, and mask dark ironies.
I fantasize about the age of myth in which there were named spirits for the many phenomena in life. A poetic device I explore is writing post-singularity weakly god-like machine superintelligences as representatives of forces of nature.
Discovering a false world breeds interest in the 'true' world. False worlds are the basis for mystery and intrigue in world-craft.
Relationships are in a sense a network of duties, and rites are the duty of the individual to the group. Rites define a relationship to society.
"In The Virtual she could ‘be’ a civilization, a bacterium, a logic system, a flat-lander, a disjunct dream, abstract phenomena, musical energy, pure evil, or even nothing at all. And that The Virtual flaunted its illusory nature affirmed for Po that the falsehoods of reality could be redeemed by the access they provided to mental frontiers."
"He checks his wound, peeling his clothes from it audibly. It has begun to fester, turning shades of dark purple and black. His throat knots, but a violence boils up... and up.. then overflows. He hunches forward, tweaking with ugly anguish, meek cryful breathes slipping through gut twists. Quivering, he rotates his limbs joints precisely into uneven, ugly shapes, gyrating in an unlocked and tripped out way. It is inhuman, an animal instinct fueled by anguish."
SALLY "It’s gonna be a city of orphans Trav. I’m gone."
TRAVIS "I’ll get you. I’ll get them safe and then I’ll get you."
Travis takes a shiny black button from his pocket, pits it in her palm.
TRAVIS "It fell of the coat. To remember me."
She bites her lip.
SALLY "You’re always falling apart."
"The soul lives in the future. The body, caught in the present, chases after it. That is desire."
"I've spent centuries repeating the things I never said. I'll never swallow all my grief, but the work isn't done."
"Each person felt princely; And thought everyone else a usurper. You never could have known peace. So we took all your bloody crowns, and we shattered them."
"She had other ideals then: Bosch’s adrogynites, a nymphic truth of the soul, and confidence that the machine is funny, for Dionysus detailed delightful delirium. Thus in playful pulses she recalled that swarthy sleeplessness when she was hypnotized by the dry dusty Summer heat of Sacramento, clingy boys, and the dancing forests of metal and captured light in her mind. She spent the last portion of her teenage years like the alcoholic, who, in his stupor, forgot entirely about alcohol and thus became sober. The clarity of a more restful adulthood had shortened her excesses and telomeres beyond her complaint or preparedness or intention, and still young she tumbled out of her rave cave to find her community had become but creaking, long-necked birds sticking their heads in the sand to escape the noise, standing sedate as to not tweak their hobbly joints, or altogether fleeing to the sparse atmospheres of mountain perches, suffocation fetishists, living death and buddhism - addicted to sadness and mechanical erotic flashes, she felt there was yet more penance for her to serve, she qualaed, ever more: 'sling a crown of porns on mine head, when all turns to sand the slowest ink to fade shall be pus from blisters deepest black.'"
Check out a few of the projects I've worked on
In a world made of machine daydreams, a theocracy of psychedelic angels seek to eradicate history. You and your pious ghost-twin Qareen begin a journey turning from adept to agent of resistance in this anti-apartheid, hypno-glitch adventure featuring Arabic mythologies.
Bankrupt millionaire Bill Bradley attempts extreme endurance challenges like the Badwater, Grand Canyon rim-to-rim, Arrowhead 135, and Aconcagua summit. At 60 and facing mounting defeats, he questions his identity and the philosophy of never backing away from the arena.
When an aimless young man sees visions of a Lovecraftian entity hidden in a hollow deep within the Earth, reality and those in it are gradually revealed to be convincing fakes, and his body is increasingly possessed by accelerating, intense episodes of ecstatic thrashing.
Young adults express views on art in this experimental film using elements of documentary sound and glitch art. It was performed with a live sonic performance at the 2019 Reel Loud Film Festival
In a world where society is defined by the alien desires of powerful sentient machines, neuromodded mother Aidy must flee to the psychoactive tunnels beneath the oil seas of Titan when her Mental Shards rebel against her.
In this interactive WebGL experience, spoken word poems and bricolaged industrial photography paint a portrait of accelerationist future shock and system addiction.
Echo's Rite is a sprawling lore project blending accelerationist future history and morbid, supernatural myths. Imagine gothic poverty worshippers in post-scarcity claytronic tunnels, a plague of Dancing Death spawned by Dionysiatic aliens, the 1000 year odyssey of elven posthuman Masaaw, Heartbroken Echo's cursed pact with the Butterfly Machine, the Clayflare and the Obituarian, the voyage of the Poemhold, and many more tales.
An immersive Hololens experience taking users through an interactive timeline of the storming of the capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Over 1200 geolocated videos from conservative social media Parler stream in real time in headset.
R-Shief is an archival and analysis platform for multi-lingual sentiment analysis and keyword taxonomy. It has the world's largest archive of social media data from the Arab Spring.
My focus and passion is writing new worlds and characters, but I also have had the pleasure of being a technical lead on several diverse and boundary-pushing computer-art projects involving XR, procedural animation, shaders and sims, volumetric capture, interactive narrative, craft-first genAI, and virtual cinematography.
I am formally educated in machine learning and film and media studies, and self-taught in 3D toolchains and software and narrative design principles. In my spare time I pursue flow arts and coding challenges with functional programming languages!
What my partners are saying
Collaborating with Josh was a revelation. His ability to blend creativity with technology transformed our vision into reality.
Josh's storytelling prowess and tech-savvy approach set a new standard. His work was beyond our wildest dreams.
Working with Josh was inspiring. His forward-thinking mindset and meticulous attention to detail ensured our project's success.
Josh is one of the most creative and technically skilled people I have ever had the pleasure to work with. From brainstorming to directing a team to coding to writing, Josh has been an indelible collaborator.
