0xDEAFBEEF

0xDEAFBEEF is an artist and engineer based in Toronto, Canada. Over the past 20 years he has been tinkering in diverse areas overlapping art and technology including music, sound recording, computer animation, blacksmithing and generative art.

He received his BASc in electrical engineering and MSc from the University of Toronto, where he contributed to internationally recognized research in the field of computer animation.

As a classically trained musician with a strong background in sound technology, he brings together all his interests in a bespoke art practice, using low level computer code and a minimal toolset to craft raw information into audiovisual artworks. His recent generative works explore the affordances of programmable blockchain technologies.

For several years, he's carried on a professional metal working practice, producing sculpture and jewellery. In his view, blacksmithing, in which the artisan crafts their own tools and production systems using materials immediately at their disposal, bears similarities to the crafting of computational systems.

Personal History

DEAFBEEF began an as art project in 2020 at the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. I emerged after 7 years living under a rock while my kids were young, to discover that modular synthesizers had come back into style. Having a background in electrical engineering, sound recording and music, I was excited the culture of synths had re-emerged. However, there was a certain amount of consumerism in the new culture, and I decided to take an alternative ascetic approach of using 'nothing' to make music, rather than sink time and money into expensive hardware that many seemed to view as magical "black boxes". Nor did I want to upgrade my 10 year old laptop to be able to run the latest DAWs. I opted instead to rebuild from scratch, using only a cheap laptop running Linux, emacs text editor and a C compiler. The intent is to work at a fundamental level, scrawling numbers directly into digital storage media later to be interpreted as sound and images.

As a developer, my favorite way to work is in the terminal, mouse free, using Emacs and command line tools. The muscle memory to me is akin to playing an instrument. I also love the aesthetic of ANSI terminals. I grew up in the 90s playing Nethack, which introduced me to programming and procedural generation. It was a formative experience. I write C programs that generate audio and visual outputs.