Blair Neal - Co-Founder
About Me
I am an artist and creative technologist with too many hobbies and interests. As a side effect of all that, I've found a place as a sort of generalist-specialist in the space of experiential design and creative technology.
My gateway drug into a lot of this work was music and performing with a band. I play guitar, use way too many effects pedals and overall wanted to know how everything worked from audio signals, to music theory, to production, to collaboration and improvisation. In the summer before college, I recorded an entire album with my high school band, Fruit Punch Catastrophe and learned a ton about all of that stuff. I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for undergraduate and graduate degrees and I focused on a sort of mix of engineering and electronic arts. From there, I worked at Fake Love, an experiential shop in NYC, from 2010 to 2020. We were acquired by The New York Times in 2016.
My personal site is here (and an older version is here). My personal projects range from live visuals, to physical AI generated tarot decks, to music videos, to code experiments, to writing, to pen plotter art, and light art hardware experiments. In the professional space I've had to make a little bit of everything from mobile apps, to large scale multi-projector installations, to museum exhibits, to stunts, to AR/VR, to web apps, and more. I've had to learn a little about a lot of things and have had to get better at connecting the dots.
I've written a bunch over the years for long form guides on things like projectors, cameras, and alternative displays - things that didn't feel like they had resources particularly relevant to my practice in creative tech. These resources are great as they are, but as things have grown, I've always wanted to make a place to collect more of these things in one place so it's easier to find relationships and collect more knowledge in one place. I'm excited to work with Cam and the rest of the community to build a collective knowledge base here.
Personal Disclosure
When trying to present a curated set of knowledge to a community, I find it very important to recognize privilege in this space, and mine is no exception. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia with fairly blue collar parents that had white collar parents. I went to a private all boys school for kindergarten through high school. These things allowed me to have a lot of advantages, including having the support to go to college and graduate school at RPI. Having the space to explore more creative pursuits in a professional context is something that I recognize is not available to everyone, so I try to cherish it as much as I can and try to give back to the community in various ways whenever possible. There are always improvements to be made in how I approach these efforts and what knowledge could be shared.
The niches of tech and creative tech still have an inclusivity problem, and I think that by opening up as much information as we can that would otherwise feel "hidden" is one of the best ways to grow and support the community that supports myself and others. A lot of information I have encountered felt like it had to be earned through mistakes or research, and being able to share those learnings with others feels very important.