Projects & Artwork
When I’m not making music or DJ mixes, I’m making tools and toys that explore sound, images, and our connection to ourselves and technology.
MKZDK's Mix Tapes
Stephen Miller of Santa Fe (1949-2018) was a World “Wild” Web Pioneer known for his psychedelic home-grown HTML and music projects. I inherited his box of early 1990’s rave / industrial / dub / ethno-techno mix tapes and digitized all 120 hours into a custom-built (and deeply skeuomorphic) online streaming player.
Pi Songs
My music generating algorithm produces million-hour long songs using the first one billion digits of pi (3.14…) These digits supply the “turn signals” used to determine every musical expression for each album in the Pi Songs project. Vice Motherboard wrote up a nice article on this effort.
Astronomy Calendar
Growing up under New Mexico’s dark skies, I learned to love star watching and all things astronomical. To help me remember to look up during special events like meteor showers, I made a calendar that you can subscribe to with your iPhone, Google calendar, etc. Every year I update it to account for whatever astronomical delights are headed our way. Today it has over 185,000 subscribers.
Risset Rhythm Explorer
I’ve always loved the “Shepard Tone” illusion, used to generate a pitch that apparently rises or falls forever. This was a single-day project where I built out a similar system that infinitely increases or decreases the tempo of audio loops.
Light Painting Projector
SampleSwap
SampleSwap.org is a place for electronic musicians to share sounds (“samples”) and their original music. The site has over 420,000 registered users, and grows by about 50 members every day. It’s also home to an extraordinary collection of creative-commons licensed music for use in films, games, etc.
Rainbow Ring Light
I invented a big 28″ ring light with individually controllable RGB LEDs for taking flattering and sometimes otherworldly portraits.
Pi Song Jukebox (2023)
Installation for exploring 100-year long algorithmic songs
Equal parts music player and time machine, the Pi Song Jukebox invites us to explore a vast expanse of numbers and time through music. The first 630 million digits of our favorite irrational number, pi, serve as a ‘score’ orchestrating the arrangement of every sound. Each digit is responsible for five seconds of music. A single rendition of this song lasts for 52,596,000 minutes, or 100 years: the lifespan of a lucky human.
Premiered at Currents New Media 2024
ACID HIT (2024)
Acid Hit is an interactive generative sound and algorithmic visual installation by Canton Becker and Jeffrey Ventrella. This work is fully self-contained, with a built-in micro projector and sound system with subbass. This work honors the Roland TB-303 Bass Line synthesizer, a device first marketed to lounge musicians but later embraced by techno innovators in the late 1980s. Participants randomly twist knobs, recreating the experimental play of the genre’s pioneers. You can also experience an acid hit online.
My Future Self
I thought it was a shame that Facebook and Twitter and blogging have all but killed the practice of keeping a diary for oneself. This site invites you to start a diary by beginning an email correspondence with “Your Future Self”. Each week you receive a new question via email. Just hit ‘reply’ to add a new entry to your diary. Social sharing is specifically disallowed, making a place for private journals once again.
Generative Art
Exploring the collective unconscious with Stable Diffusion AI
Electronic Oddities
White Noise MP3s
When my son was a newborn, we wanted to play white noise overnight to help him sleep. I couldn’t find anything I liked online, so I composed some in my music studio. I figured other parent’s might want these MP3s as well, so I threw together a quick web page to share them for free. Imagine my surprise when this became the single most popular page of my website, with 135,000 unique visitors per year.
Photography
The Sculptabout Game
I like the board game Cranium okay, but I LOVE when it’s your turn to sculpt something. So, I invented a cooperative two-person card game which is entirely about sculpting with clay. All you need is some clay and a print-out of these PDFs to play.