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Oliver Simpson
New Media design
I am interested in the way we, as humans, experience things.
I want to build a world with rich interactions, full of wonder and possibility.
I design and develop apps + websites, games and public art installations. I also like to VJ, create generative art and motion graphics.
View my Linked-In profile for my professional resume, or my Behanced profile for my UI and graphic design projects. Contact me if you want to say hello.
Moon Room
The Moon Room is an immersive experience at Never Apart, a new non-profit arts and culture centre in Montreal. People lie on bean bags around a three-dimensional representation of the Moon, while surround-sound speakers fill the room with ambient, cosmic sounds. The room promotes a sense of calm and connection to the cosmos; it is a space of meditation and tranquility. Our team - myself, Kelly Nunes and Adam Sajkowski - was selected by Never Apart to bring this project to life. I was responsible for video mapping and all digital aspects of the project. I used the C++ creative coding framework: OpenFramworks, together with the mapping software: Madmapper, to achieve this. It took approximately a month to build the Moon Room. We faced many technical challenges and I learned a lot about projecting onto non-flat surfaces.High resolution images of the Moon's entire surface, together with more detailed surface videos, are provided by Arizona State University. You can read more about the making of the Moon Room in this Moon Room Interview: Kelly Nunes.
Red Bull Music Academy 2016, Montreal
Visual projections for CFCF + Jean Michel Blais at Place des Arts, Cinquieme Salle. at RBMA. I worked with graphic designer Adam Sajkowski and design agency Daily Tous Les Jours under the direction of Kelly Nunes to create high quality audio-reactive graphics for the concert. We used a contact mic to receive sound from JMB's piano and transmitted live midi data from CFCF's computer that was processed live using a Max MSP custom pactch and a bespoke Open Frameworks app to trigger graphic elements in real time that were projected onto a projection-mapped surface. We were delighted with the result: we could see a visual interpretation of the music from each artist blended beautifully together that produced and extremely delicate and sensitive visual accompaniment to the music.
Array
'The sounds of vacuum tubes and transistor rhythms'. Array is a dark, brooding, ambient-electronic album by Montreal artist Aether Pilot. The soundscapes represent his vison of a distopian future, inspired by soviet era architecture and technology. I was asked to create visual material for all six tracks. The visual elements are computer-generated using a custom program I made using Quartz Composer and composited in After Effects. Art direction by Gridspace.
Le Chromatograph
I was comissioned by the Montreal interaction design agency, La Camaraderie, to create a screensaver that would support the physical chromatograph machine. This 19th Century invention is a semi-automatic drawing machine that they recreated and then presented as an interactive public art installation. Learn more about this marvelous drawing machine.
Live Visual Projections
I've been performing live visuals (or 'VJing') at events for over 10 years. I have performed live visuals at clubs and festivals for some of the most respected artists in the underground electronic music scene including Richie Hawtin, Moritz von Oswald, Juan Atkins, DJ Stingray, Veronica Vasicka and John Talabot. You can follow my VJ adventures on my Facebook artist page: Ollygram.
The Grid
The Grid is a series of programmatic animations designed specifically for a low-res / large format grid of LED panels installed at La Société des Arts Technologiques for Mutek festival 2013 in Montreal. I was invited to VJ under my own name (Ollygram) on The Grid for Juan Atkins and Moritz Von Oswald for the closing night of the festival. Watch the demo video. Art direction by Iregular.
Contact
You can write to me at g[dot]oliversimpson@gmail[dot]com
