Inspired by the work of computer graphics pioneer John Whitney, Elena is a simple iPhone toy that allows you to create beautiful Lissajous wave patterns that gently oscillate across the screen. Tap and hold to create a new pattern – the longer you hold a finger down the bigger your pattern will be. Whilst […]

Yuugen is a simple musical toy created for SCR, a creative label for screen media from Japan’s THA.
The idea of creating a very simple musical toy came about when I watched my two year old niece Elena play with the lovely Bloom iPhone app from Brian Eno. I loved the fact that she just […]

Ever since I wrote in my book Analog In, Digital Out, how I hooked up a doorbell to my Mac so it rang when a visitor came to my site, I’ve always been fascinated with connecting real world objects to the internet. But the doorbell thing was a complete hack, involving java, a Making […]

I remember when I was a kid I loved to make short films on Super 8 in the back garden with my friends. Mostly they were sci-fi type epics and even had cutting edge special effects - i.e. me taking a scalpel to the film negative frame by frame to make laser beam effects. […]

I’ve always liked the simplicity of opening up a sketchbook and drawing ideas out. I’ve tried many “digital” idea capturing applications, but I’ve always returned to the good old paper and pencil (or in my case my trusty Space Pen). So I wanted to create an interface based on the idea of simply scribbling […]

As regular readers will know I’ve always been fascinated with visualizing massive amounts of data, and creating new objects from many small parts, such as the Cinema Redux project.
Recently I saw a really wonderful example of the beauty of the massive made from the small when I visited decodeunicode.org. Now a site that catalogs […]

I’ve just updated the site I put together as a tribute to some of my dad’s work as a photographer over at JohnDawesPictures.com.
Well when I say update what I really mean is I’ve spent a bit more time on the photo viewing application I’ve built to display his photos. The “Lightbox” engine is now […]

As part of Coudal Partner’s fabulous Swap Meat feature, myself and Jim Coudal have hooked up to create a super special, limited edition Cinema Redux print of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. These are very high quality 16″ x 20″ Lambda continuous tone prints and a must have for any discerning Kubrick geek.
Check out the […]

Scattr, my simple Flickr viewing gadget, inspired by the original photo thing on my homepage, is now out of beta, with some cool new features for the bargain price of $9.99. One of the great new additions is an auto slideshow mode so you can have Scattr play through your images when it first loads […]

There’s a brand new version of Scattr, my free Flickr viewing gadget, now available for downloading. Thanks to everybody who gave me some great feedback on the first version. While I’m still to put in all the great ideas that have been mentioned, version 0.3 has some cool additions that include: user definable background image, […]

Back in 1999, whilst exploring the capabilities of programming in Flash 4, I made a kind of video editor that I called Psycho Studio.
This little app allowed you to edit the shower scene from Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho and to save your efforts into a gallery. When I look at the code now, well, […]

A personal homage to the great graphic designer Saul Bass, Saul Bass on the Web, which first appeared in 1998, was created for several reasons.
At the time there was no single resource about Saul Bass and his work, so I took it upon myself to throw together a site about this legendary designer, mainly […]

As a long time fan of Alfred Hitchcock, not to mention the work of Saul Bass, one of my all time favourite films is still Vertigo. Not only is the film one of Hitchcocks greatest pieces of work, the opening titles by Saul Bass, together with John Whitney is one of my most admired pieces […]

Following on from my Atari Flash Drive I decided to take the Dremel to another piece of Atari kit - this time the iconic joystick.

This is an Atari 4 port USB hub, complete with status indicator LED. It uses a cheap 4 port hub made for laptops which I bought from good old […]

Following on from my post about good mistakes, the other day I was uploading some new images to my server, when I mistakenly had the transfer type setting in my FTP software set to TEXT. It should be set to BINARY or AUTO when uploading images. When I went to view the images I found […]

As technology gets more advanced and things gets smaller sometimes I think are we losing those lovely touchy feely qualities of the past? Yeah sure things were heavy and clunky but you really felt you had hold of something.
Take USB Flash drives - brilliant in every way not least of which is their […]

My Dad has always been one of the biggest influences on my work and career. He’s been a professional photographer all his adult life, most of that concentrating on sport, covering some of the worlds biggest sporting events in his 40 plus years of being a photographer. As a personal project I’ve started to put […]

Most of my time at the moment is taken up with the brilliant Making Things Teleo system - getting to grips with controlling Flash with switches and knobs and the like as well as output like having Flash control motors and such like. Along the way I’ve blown a few bulbs up and nearly blew […]

I’ll be speaking in New York at Flashforward about “Twisting Data” and how Jazz, and particularly people like Thelonious Monk are a constant source of inspiration for a lot of my work. What I love about Monk is how he experimented with the composition of a song, putting notes in places that shouldn’t be […]

A sort of follow on from the Don’t Look Now thing, Cinema Redux explores the idea of distilling a whole movie down into one single image. I built a little app in processing that takes a sample every second from a film and builds up an image for the entire film. The guys over […]

In between watching Road to Perdition (which is bloody superb) and Southern Comfort on Saturday, I created a little piece of software using processing that processes every frame of a DVD and distorts them into weird twisted images. The film I used to do it was the eerie 1973 classic “Don’t Look Now” starring Donald […]

I’ve just finished the first phase of an interactive memorial to the victims of 911. Each person is displayed as a “pillar” with the height of the pillar relative to their age when they died. The pillars combined create a virtual tower of strength. I’m planning on developing the idea to enable visitors to […]

What happens when you take the worlds most ubiquitous search engine and combine it with the worlds biggest fast food chain? Simple - McGoogle. Type in your search and you get your Google search results back as a series of fries and burgers as shown on the bottom of a McDonalds take-away bag. It’s […]

Psycho Studio has been nominated in the 5th Annual Webby Awards - the Oscars for the internet! Obviously I’m a little bit pleased to say the least.