Growing up in New Mexico, Jim seeks to integrate the beauty of the region’s desolation and solitude into his work. Jim’s longtime fascination with sound synthesis led him to teach himself soldering in order to build a modular analog synthesizer. A desire to accompany his sonic experimentation with fitting visuals led him to explore pre-rendered and realtime music visualizations, often focusing on generative and pseudorandom techniques. A keen interest in electronic hardware has led Jim to build music synthesizers and interfaces that take advantage of the best that electronics of both today and yesteryear have to offer.
While Jim’s audiovisual explorations have taken him from 1960’s-era analog circuitry through modern digital signal processing techniques, he currently focuses on the marriage of his electronic and his visual experimentation. When not making music or rendering visuals, Jim works mostly on multimedia hardware development. Working with Charlie Burgin, he designed and built the Gemini synthesizer, a low-parts-count modular synthesizer with many self-designed and modified circuits. He also works with real-time audio processing on microcontrollers, microcontroller-based audiovisual interface design, and musical robotics. Together with Meason Wiley, Jim built the speaker arrays for the new KarmetiK Machine Orchestra.
Having completed his BFA in 2010, Jim is currently serving as a research and teaching assistant in the MTIID department at the California Institute of the Arts.
