Jeff Crouse » About Jeff

About Jeff

Third Person Bio

Jeff Crouse makes loving parodies of technology in the form of software, websites, and installations. Jeff’s previous work includes YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot/puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been taken down from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam.

Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, an adjunct professor at the IMA program at Hunter College, and a freelance programmer. Someday, he plans to add “novelist” or “short story author” to that list.

First Person Bio

Being a product of the Whole Language teaching philosophy in my early education, my artistic career began with a short story I wrote in the first grade entitled “Teh Little Fah”, about a goldfish and the house in which he lived. I fell in love with writing at a young age and spent most of my life assuming that I’d be a short story writer or novelist.

That was, until I discovered computers. And, in particular, the Internet. Things slowly started changing from there.

In 1999, I graduated from a small private high school in Wilmington, DE, where I was an art major, dazzling my teachers with simple Photoshop tricks and my ability to write some HTML. While in high school, I interned at a design shop called Möbius New Media, and learned a few things about graphic design and web development.

Then, in the fall of 1999, I packed up and moved to New York to attend the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. While there, I studied fiction writing, cosmology, and digital media. I interned at the dot com era behemoth, Circle.com (which, like most dotcoms, was bought by several companies before being bought by Euro RSCG), and also worked as a freelance programmer, having taught myself PHP by dissecting the auto-generated code produced by Dreamweaver. The one class that probably had the greatest affect on me was called Pixels and Bits, taught by Rebecca Ross, where we learned Java while deconstructing digital images and experimenting with interactivity. This put me on course for what I would eventually become my current career. In the end of my time at NYU, I stuck to my roots and presented a colloquium in which I compared science to creation myths from several different religions and cultures.

In 2004, inspired by the possibilities of interactive fiction, I moved down to Atlanta, GA to attend the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech. I was excited to work with Janet Murray, director of the program and author of “Hamlet on the Holodeck”, one of the seminal texts in the interactive storytelling field, and Michael Mateas, co-author of Façade, the worlds first interactive drama, and author of the ABL language, a behavioral language for creating beleivable characters for interactive experiences. Sure enough, Tech offered more than enough interactive fiction courses to make me somewhat disillusioned with the goal as it was being pursued.

While at Georgia Tech, the idea of “games studies” in higher education was just taking off, and I was somewhat swept up in the excitement of this new academic field. And so, after my first year at Tech, I interned at Tell Tale Games in San Rafael, California, working within their game engine to help create the CSI game. I was impressed with TellTale’s dedication to storytelling, but was a bit dismayed by the extreme specialization that I saw in the games industry in general.

In my second year at Tech, I decided to embrace my web development background instead of trying to avoid it, and created Switchboard (no longer supported), a web services library for Processing that allowed artists to use the web as a kind of database of content that can be dynamically incorporated into works that I called “Real-time artworks”. In 2006, I presented a paper about Real-time art, the Switchboard library, and a proof-of-concept called Interactive Frank, a real-time storytelling engine using text and music culled from the Internet to create a monologue inspired by the style of radio producer, Joe Frank.

After graduation, I happened to stumble upon Eyebeam while browsing the web one day. To me, it seemed like heaven – to be surrounded by smart people working on cool art and technology, and to get paid doing it. So, not having a clear idea of what I wanted to do post graduation, and extremely excited about the prospect of being able to continue the kind of tech/art work that I was doing at Tech, I applied.

So, in late 2006, I moved back to New York to become a fellow in the Production Lab at Eyebeam. A year later, I was accepted back as a senior fellow, and that brings us to the present. All of the work that I have done while at Eyebeam is documented on this site.

Artists Statement

I love the absurdity of technology. It’s fascinating to me how completely we adopt things that are so unnatural and awkward. Technology can be alienating, anti-social, violent, and stupid, and we still want it bigger, louder, more mind-numbing. This is what I like to focus on in my work. My parodies invite people to make fun of themselves by engaging with familiar technology, but tweaked – sometimes only slightly – to make it absurd.

Normally this would make me just another schmuck decrying how Facebook is ruining civilization, except that I love it all. I sign up for every single new Web2.0 site that hits my inbox, I am a total gadget whore, and my attention span is intimately linked to the maximum allowed video length on YouTube. My parodies are tributes to the absurdity.

Fictional Bio

Born in 1703 to a kind peasant family in feudal Japan, I made my way to Hawaii at the age of fourteen by lashing together soda bottles into a raft and setting sail. When I eventually washed ashore in a missile range on the West coast of Kauai, I got a job calibrating guidance systems by fabricating a resume and charming the hiring manager. On my off time, I had several memorable romances with adventurous tourist girls and taught myself Russian. I developed a taste for pork and pineapple. I amassed a fortune when I invented the head-mounted umbrella, and after three years of traveling the globe and living a life of leisure, I was conned by four Australian men in Brussels who claimed to be financing a film about the life of the Greek philosopher, Lucretius, a personal hero of mine.

With no money and no passport, I decided to try my hand at politics, and quickly climbed the political ranks in the small Ganshoren municipality by stoking the fires of a small independence movement, which eventually led to a full-scale civil war, but in the process made many enemies, and eventually was forced to apply for asylum in the United States. During this process, I fled to Paris, where I lived in a commune who believed that the American painter, Bob Ross, was a prophet, and was compiling a holy text based on his television program. I was able to de-program several of the members and led them to the port city of Dakar in Senegal, where we boarded a tanker ship bound for the US. After a month of hiding from the Senegalese sailors in the boiler room of the ship, we arrived in New York.

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