Elevon is an ambitious project that completely changes the experience of consuming music. By utilizing special synthesizers that interpolate visual art into the building blocks of sound, "regions of music" are produced as I would produce any other project. The original visual artwork is then reconstructed as an explorable, 3-dimensional environment using Cryengine, which is a visual engine used to create locales as you might visit in a First Person Shooter experience. Users may then explore the environment at will, thus yielding different aspects, or "tracks" of the music that was created using the imagery in the first place. Rather than passively absorbing "music" as you do by playing a track or even dancing to it, this approach makes you an active participant in what you hear, how you hear it, and for how long. As you can imagine, this is quite an undertaking, so it is a long-term project involving experimental digital design techniques, artwork I have already created (one piece you see as the background image of this page), granular synthesis techniques, creating visual environmental assets and particles in Autodesk 3ds max, ZBrush and After Effects, and assembling this and the music into a consumeable product.

Elevon is a portmanteau of Aileron and Elevator, which belong to aircraft terminology. Elevons are devices which control both pitch and roll. As an artist and as a person I want to reach a higher plateau. This project fits that description, hence the name Elevon.

"Species of Architecture" comes from my interest in  experimenting with things we can't actually create practically.  In fact the whole reason I learned CGI was so that I could recreate images from my dreams. Living buildings are sometimes in my dreams. Are humans not living buildings? We are alive yet we house viri, bacteria, various microorganisms, etc.  So I often explore ideas like this, bioluminescent architecture, etc.

The original art you see  in the background is about  4 meters wide. It was made using Adobe Illustrator, but what you see here is not the usual fare for that application. If you were to zoom in you would see  innumerable black lines. In spite of what your brain says you are seeing, there is no shading in this image!

This is part of a series of similar images. It's difficult to do because at this level you are pushing the application far beyond its intended use. I had to create  individual parts of the structure, take multiple screen captures, then reassemble them in Photoshop. The files are otherwise too large to export and even too large to save in Photoshop,  so it has to be reassembled digitally as well as physically for print.

This will not be an issue for interactive use because whatever architectural forms I need I will just build them as usual with CGI.

Regarding the logo seen from the annotation icon to the left of this one, I had some specific ideas. First, I wanted the logotype to actually reflect the architecture. Using the same appearance as the structures, I created the individual letters. Second, when people see it, I want them to feel like they are getting a glimpse of some forbidden dimension of reality, something not meant for human eyes. I wanted it to radiate, psychologically, some type of unknowable energy. If you look very closely you'll notice that the black shades in the background image are slightly darker than what appear to be the darkest black shades in the logo. I did this so that it would appear as if the object of the logo actually belonged in the environment it is in, in this case a lighter sky background, as opposed to simply laying it on top. It's subtle but that's the kind of insane attention I give to these details. I enjoy it.