Jeff Crouse (born September 10, 1980 in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland. With a population of 585,708 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census and estimated at 568,271 in 2024, it is the List of United States ...

) is an American

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

and

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...

/creative technologist who works with live

data feed Data feed is a mechanism for users to receive updated data from data sources. It is commonly used by real-time applications in point-to-point settings as well as on the World Wide Web. The latter is also called web feed. News feed is a popular for ...

s from the internet to make art works.

Background

Crouse's undergraduate study in Computer Science and Fiction Writing led to creating works that continued the history of

automatic writing Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged sp ...

through using computers, code, and dynamic sources on the internet. Interactive Frank, for example, used sources on the internet to create dynamically generated audio programs reminiscent of public radio pioneer,

Joe Frank Joe Frank ( Joseph Langermann; August 19, 1938 – January 15, 2018) was an American writer, teacher, and radio performer best known for his often philosophical, humorous, surrealist, and sometimes absurd monologues and radio dramas he recorde ...

. Another example is ChinASCII a video game based on the life

Charles Bukowski Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German Americans, German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambien ...

. In order to facilitate his projects, Jeff Crouse developed Switchboard a library for Processing. Switchboard allows "artists and designers to easily use a variety of live data sources for digital art". After completing a Master of Science degree in Information Design and Technology at

Georgia Tech The Georgia Institute of Technology (commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, GT, and simply Tech or the Institute) is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Established in 1885, it has the lar ...

in 2006, Crouse began a Production Fellowship at Eyebeam in 2006 and in 2007 he became a Senior Fellow. He is on the Add-Art advisory committee.

Notable works

* Invisible Threads (aka Double Happiness Jeans or Double Happiness Manufacturing) - a collaboration with Stephanie Rothenberg. Double Happiness is a

sweatshop A sweatshop or sweat factory is a cramped workplace with very poor and/or illegal working conditions, including little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting and ventilation, or uncomfortably or dangerously high or low temperat ...

manufacturing plant in

Second Life ''Second Life'' is a multiplayer virtual world that allows people to create an Avatar (computing), avatar for themselves and then interact with other users and user-created content within a multi-user online environment. Developed for person ...

to build jeans based on orders made in real life. The jeans are designed and assembled in the factory and then delivered back into real life by being printed on fabric via a large format printer. The result is a tangible, wearable (however impractical) pair of pants. The project began in 2007 and was shown at the 2008

Sundance Film Festival The Sundance Film Festival is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with 423,234 combined in-person and online viewership in 2023. The festival has acted ...

in the New Frontiers exhibition.

Awards

* 2022 Gerald Loeb Award for Personal Finance and Personal Service

References

External links

Jeff Crouse
Official Website
Art Forum
review of Invisible Threads (requires login) {{DEFAULTSORT:Crouse, Jeff 1980 births Living people American digital artists Artists from New York (state) Georgia Tech alumni Artists from Baltimore Gerald Loeb Award winners for Personal Finance