Exhibited at SIGGRAPH 2025 | New Media Architectures: Vancouver

Heron’s Soundscape is a generative musical composition designed as an interactive augmented reality (AR) experience, to be played by participants using mobile devices and the “Heron’s Dreamscape” mural as a visual score. Sound and visual accompaniment is created in real-time through participants’ direct interactions with the mural.

Audience members create one or more “performances” of the piece determined by their choices and interactions, including the angles, locations, and paths they trace visually with their mobile devices while hearing the results of each engagement in relation to the images presented upon their device’s viewfinder.

Check it out if you’re in Downtown Vancouver:
https://amusesmile.github.io/HeronsSoundscape

A revisiting of the New Media Architectures: Vancouver exhibition at SIGGRAPH 2025 which featured augmented reality (AR) works by eight artists in dialogue with “Heron’s Dreamscape”, a vibrant public mural by artist Priscilla Yu. Participating artists included: Jiwon Ham & Ana María Cárdenas, Joshua Dickinson, Sahar Sajadieh & Manaswi Mishra, Mike Rader, Darya Ramezani & Gene Anthony Santiago-Holt, and Priscilla Yu. Curated by: Miriam Esquitín, Johannes DeYoung, and Gustavo Alfonso Rincon. The exhibition reimagined the role of public art through digital augmentation, activating the mural as a living interface between place, community, and technology. Our discussion will delve into the collaborative process behind the exhibition and the evolving relationship between physical murals and digital interventions. Together, we’ll explore how site-specific digital media can expand the narrative capacity of public artworks, deepen community engagement, and reframe our experience of urban environments. Through an interdisciplinary lens, the conversation will address the potentials and challenges of blending artistic traditions with emerging technologies — and what it means to co-author public space in the digital age. All audience members will gain insight into the artistic, curatorial, and technical approaches and visions that shaped the exhibition, while reflecting on the broader cultural impact of art in augmented urban landscapes. This SPARKS event will feature artists Joshua Dickinson, Jiwon Ham, Ana María Cárdenas, Mike Rader, and Sahar Sajadieh in dialogue with curators Miriam Equitín, Gustavo Rincon, and Johannes DeYoung. Acknowledgements: This exhibition is organized in partnership with ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGGRAPH DAC standing committee, Bentall Centre, and Downtown Van.

Joshua Dickinson, October 24, 2022 from mat.ucsb on Vimeo.

We were honored to be interviewed alongside BT by Justin Colletti of SonicScoop! Together we discuss the origins of Tails, reverb as a compositional tool, medieval music, BT’s original concept for the plugin, and how he uses it creatively. Toward the end of the video we also drop a few surprises related to future projects.

Special thanks to Plugin Alliance for making this happen!

For our ongoing series of interviews through Static Attraction, we talk art and design with Ted Chin, better known by his handle “Ted’s Little Dream.” He was chosen as the 2021 Photoshop splash screen cover artist so it was extremely fun hearing his story about how that happened, as well as his thoughts about the creative community, copyright, and NFTs.

I spent much of 2020 working on what would eventually become Silo. The project was an attempt to design a single instrument capable of creating the type of complex soundscapes used by composers such as Curtis Roads and Horacio Vaggione. While no simple effect will ever be capable of the meticulous design of such works, Silo’s unique focus on per-grain control of spatial position and reverb amount does seem to get closer to the heart of this musical style, and has now become a popular tool for many modern sound designers. It was a pleasure working with the graphic designer Daniel Glaser, who created the interface and visual concept.

Silo Sound Demo

For our ongoing series of interviews through Static Attraction, we talk human nature and design with Dr. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist and public intellectual famous for his research in social theory regarding such topics as “the paradox of choice.”

For our ongoing series of interviews through Static Attraction, we talk architecture and design with Marco Arredondo.

Under the name “Echobit,” Brian Hansen and I have been performing immersive VJ sets and audio-visual experiments using the Oculus Rift. We apply audio feature extraction and MIR techniques in order to create rich, interactive visuals. Users are able to explore visual worlds while they react to musical material in real time. The visuals are also projected on the wall so that all audience members can all take part in the experience.

I believe it’s the first application of Virtual Reality technology as applied to VJing and music visualization in general.

It is built in OpenFrameworks using a custom system for generating audio-reactive geometry and GLSL shaders.