Background
It's possible I was born a Computational Media major. As early as 1st grade, I would create mazes for my friends, populate them with creatures from movies like Star Wars or Harry Potter , and invent rules and narratives for them explore. In middle school, inspired by my Grandfather's MS-DOS football simulations, I taught myself to code simple arcade games in BASIC. In high school, my friends and I banded together to create comic book zines that we distributed to our classmates.
By the time I was ready to graduate from high school I was torn between pursuing a career as an artist or a technologist. When I learned about Computational Media, it seemed like a way I could continue to be both!
It was, but it was also more than that. CM taught me how to see the computer not just as a tool, but as a medium for artistic expression, and it taught to view the making of art as the technological process it always has been. CM let me explore the artistic possibilities of videogames, Twitter, drawing programs, and artificial intelligence, among other things. Career-wise, it led me to internships at Electronic Arts and Microsoft. But most importantly, it introduced me to a community of brilliant and creative peers I hope to always remain friends with!
Work Experience
Here are a few projects I worked on:
- RASTER BURN is a competitive 2v2 videogame I made with Kyle Blevens (CM, now at Microsoft).
- Dame Celeste is a castle-escaping, stealthy, dress-up adventure game I made with Kelly Snyder (CM, now at Microsoft), Matthew Guzdial (CM, now a Ph.D. student at GT), and a few other students.
- The Pursuit Of Bot is a Twitter bot that remixes the Declaration of Independence.
- Electro Terrestrials is an iPad game I helped make with the Georgia Tech Game Studio (http://gamestudio.gatech.edu).
- Here's a video in which Kyle and I are interviewed during our participation in the Indie Bits festival in South Carolina, where we won Best Experimental Game for Walk Through: http://www.indiegrits.com/indie-bits-2014-recap/.
