Why I created Beautiful Machine
Creating a Machine
Over the past couple of decades, I've had the opportunity to work on creative projects with sophisticated technology needs from multiple vantage points. I've worked for technology vendors, creative agencies and artists. These varied roles gave me insights into each business, their operational models and motives, how they view and market themselves, how they work with their clients, and ultimately how to position each to do their best work.
In my role as a producer and technical director, I've always felt like I was creating a machine - integrating not just hardware and software, but people, businesses and even industries together to achieve a desired outcome. As once disparate disciplines all converge into "experiential", and creative teams stretch to develop work outside of their primary capabilities, it's producers - specifically technologically proficient and creative savvy producers - that hold the key to bringing transdisciplinary experiences into the world successfully.
In the beginning
I got my first taste of production work as a stagehand in my high school theater. After working my way through school doing mostly sound engineering, and dabbling in adjacent disciplines - I eventually found my way into project management roles in the live production and AV industries.
Given my academic and creative background in integrated (read: "new") media and experimental sound (and generally wonky nature) my focus tended to be on unusual projects with detailed requirements. I grew into leading technical teams on projects with advanced technologies of the time like media servers, projection mapping, sensors, and kinetic elements in the context of live events, theater, interactive experiences and art installations - before the terms “experiential” and “immersive” had swept through and fully soaked all facets of the industry. I was not that into working on the biggest projects, but I love complexity the way Marie Kondo says she loves a mess - and I love working at a scale where experimentation is possible.
After leading a project called the Brain Index for Technomedia at Columbia University - I set out to leverage my expanding skillset as a freelance technical producer. Luckily, a friend connected me with the founders of an agency called Listen - that was looking for someone to lead a project to recreate Brian Eno & Peter Chilvers iPhone App Bloom into a HoloLens experience in Amsterdam, in partnership with Microsoft. Having been involved in experimental and avant garde music as both an artist and appreciator, I couldn't pass up that opportunity. It’s still one of my favorite things I’ve ever played a role in building and a shining example of what the technology can do - holographic, interactive, collaborative music!
Shortly afterwards, I accepted the job as Listen’s head of production. In my role, I built an enviable team of producers, technologists and partners that allowed Listen and A_DA to deliver technologically complex experiences that were creative use cases for Microsoft’s technology. We designed and produced experiences in partnership with artists like Brian Eno, Moses Sumney, Bjork, Julianna Barwick, Priya Aluwalia, Martin Garrix, Mel Chin and institutions like the Smithsonian, the Galerie des Plan Relief in Paris and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport. A_DA eventually merged with its parent, Superfly, where the work continued building next generation experiences that incorporated the new, shiny generative AI tools.
I’ve led production of many forms and flavors of creative project with highly integrated technology systems. I’ve been on the ground as a technician laying cable and loading trucks, and I’ve led large interdisciplinary teams on multi-million dollar projects. I'm equally comfortable working on events as I am on permanent installations. I approach everything I work on with the mindset that I am the setter of vibes and the keeper of process that dictates how everyone that contributes to a project will feel about it when it is over.
Digital Physical Temporary Permanent
Anyone else who’s been at this for a while has witnessed incredible shifts not just in technology, but also in the niche industries around events, exhibits and experiences. What were once disparate industries like event production, themed entertainment, exhibit design and maybe even architecture are merging, evolving and competing against one another in the emergent business of experience design.
The same teams that might have been working on events might find themselves designing an experience center that is installed in a corporate headquarters, a ticketed activation that will run for an indefinite length of time, or a museum exhibit. Exhibit design teams are taking note of the new players in this marketplace, and finding ways to apply the mature design practices they’ve built in other contexts, like shorter term activations and experiential master planning.
When it comes to experience design, the syntax, working methodologies and business models vary across disciplines, but the design techniques and underlying technologies are materially the same.
There have always been little gold rushes around emerging technologies and an appetite for the recently possible among artists and brands alike that swells, peaks and fizzles out. In the last decade, there was the blockchain/NFT moment amid the COVID shutdown, the mixed reality moment with advances made in the mid 2010’s in computer vision and spatial computing. Now “AI”, a catch-all term for a wide range of tools, captures the popular imagination while feeding our existential anxiety. Through all this, creatives grapple with how to leverage these tools and techniques to signify relevance and create impact for their clients. Experience designers are expert at imagining how an experience should look, function and feel - but usually not in the underlying mechanisms that bring each moment to life.
But experience designers do not need to be technology experts... with advanced technologies mediating an ever increasing quotient of our life experiences, you no longer need to be a technologist to imagine new experiences that are underwritten by sophisticated systems. Technical feasibility used to be more of a concern, but with the vast array of tools available and the speed at which they are evolving, technical feasibility is less of a concern than the often finite nature of budgets, timelines and will.
One of the lectures that stuck with me from undergrad was about how pedestrian objects we take for granted like pencils and chairs are technologies. The humble pencil was, at some point, the new hotness in human innovation and "revolutionized writing" (sound familiar?). As time marches forward, new generations enter the creative marketplace - vibe coding with Copilot or Gemini, or prototyping in TouchDesigner are the new Photoshop; skills that most new graduates of the ever expanding roster of art & technology programs universally graduate with. Thirty years ago Photoshop was the new darkroom, where 100 years prior photography had begun to replace painting and drawing in image making. Now Photoshop is not a skill even worth mentioning on your resume.
As new technological tools emerge and become part of a medium, it doesn’t diminish or even really change the role of creative humans in imagining and articulating new worlds, telling impactful stories and architecting novel experiences - and the demand for transdisciplinary storytelling is greater than ever. The novelty of new tools fades and they become as common as a pencil, but human creativity and the desire to innovate remains hard coded in us.
It stands to reason then, that designing with technology won't be an exclusive skill for much longer, but part of the toolset of every design team.
Transdisciplinary Storytelling Requires Transdisciplinary Leadership
There are many styles of technical leadership across the creative and entertainment fields, and significant differences between them. The roles are context dependent. Events utilize technical directors to manage the technical design process and bring together all disciplines like audiovisual, lighting design, IT, scenic fabrication, rigging, staging, labor management and logistics. It is a production role that encompasses technology, strategy, design, budget management and project leadership.
In a creative technology context, often the technical director is like the CTO of the project - they develop the tech stack and guide development and like everyone in creative technology, their backgrounds vary. In the context of generative and interactive content the technical director acts like a VFX supervisor - they take responsibility for the pipeline, and process by which the media and underlying software is made, often working in tandem with a counterpart that might be a more hardware-focused technical director.
In a permanent architectural media installation, there often isn’t a technical leader that takes responsibility for and provides direction on the entirety of the engineering aspects of the project. There are project directors, project managers, creative directors, designers, technologists and consultants - but no one person leads or watches over the full technical scope of the project at the executive level, and often technical resources are tapped later in the process, to help identify build requirements and design systems.
You often see producers and technologists on LinkedIn, perhaps recently off a tough project, basically pleading to be “brought in early” or at least earlier… to identify and rectify the scope gaps and overlaps that they had been tasked with resolving before they had the opportunity to imperil their project. More often than not, this peril is due to an absence of meaningful technical production leadership. Without the foresight of a technical production resource that can essentially see the future of how the process of building an experience will play out in a detailed way, projects can and do fail to meet their budgets, timelines and creative objectives.
A vision for a modern technical production resource, then, is a person or small team that works fluidly between digital & physical elements - and excels at harmonizing between them, rooted in the notion that their role and their discipline is to provide the interface, or make the integration, between creative teams and the technical disciplines needed to build the project. To know how the software developer, the structural engineer, and the integrator are going to work together to achieve a unified hardware & software system from the beginning. To steer a project towards elegant solutions under the hood from the beginning. A technical producer or director is both a consultant and a producer - providing early and ongoing technical consulting. But, as producers and not merely consultants, they also take responsibility for the outcome.
In the emerging future where experience design and build sits at the intersection of creative and technical disciplines that all work in different ways, and have different process expectations, technical directors and technical producers are the key to leading multifaceted teams across various industries and disciplines, in service of achieving the design. Their role is strategic, technical, operational and even a bit creative - since they should have enough creative expertise and experience to allow them to see and execute the vision faithfully.
Who We Are
Beautiful Machine is a production company that serves this emerging future, where bespoke technology isn’t a specialty design niche but a component of every exhibit and event. I envision Beautiful Machine as a team that can meet the needs of experiential creatives now, and in the rapidly coming future where boundaries between disciplines will fall away and what will be left is creatives crafting stories, spaces, sensations and moments - and a team of builders that shows up with the tools, techniques and resources to make them real.
