August 19, 2019
Hey everyone, welcome to the Luminous Podcast! This is a conversational series where I sit down with new media artists from across the scene and around the globe (but usually in my living room). My goal with this program is to create a relaxed forum where I can talk one on one with my friends and colleagues who are behind some of the most amazing examples of visual and interactive art. How many times have we seen some installation that inspires us on Instagram or on a blog and wondered about the people who made it all happen? It’s pretty easy to find the name of the artist or the team that made it happen, but we never get a good sense of who these people really are. What drives them? Where did they come from and how did they come up in the scene? What do they love about the work they do, and what drives them crazy? These are the questions that I want to answer as I speak with some of the community’s most prolific names.
Today Matthew Ragan joins me for a beer here at the Lumen Labs and we talk all about his life and career in the world of projection mapping. He’s a Touch Designer Wizard who started out doing live performance art at Keen State back in the early 2000’s, then during his masters program at Arizona State he hosted a popular Touch Designer Tutorial vlog. Working closely with Derivative Software he developed a host of teaching materials geared at educating a new generation of users in advanced techniques.
His vlog and expertise ended up catching the attention of the guys over at Obscura Digital who scooped him up right out of school. He’s worked with them for the past few years, recently taking on the role of their lead software developer. Anyone who’s paying attention to the world of projection mapping knows how important Obscura is to the scene and how they’ve raised the bar for new media installations in places all around the world. Matt takes us through his time working there and we talk about how the makers of a tool help to define the art that gets made and how that cycle defines our industry. It’s a great episode with a legend in the scene, I think you’ll like it!