Taped Together was a collection of publicly submitted responses to the prompt "I am getting vaccinated because...". It is inspired by the work of artist Mark Reinhart’s duct tape graffiti on city buildings, who during the COVID-19 pandemic connected the community with bright coloured messages of…

POLLEN started as an idea to visualize Slack workspace channels for the Data Visualization Society. The society has over 70 channels and it was difficult for members to get a sense of the channel landscape and the amazing discussions. Working to solve this problem quickly evolved into creating a new…

The third and final phase of Between the Sand is an interactive web application that premiered in Art the Science's Polyfield Gallery on December 5th, 2020 to coincide with World Soil Day. To create this, the web application from Phase 2 was expanded and optimized. An Explore tab was added where one…

This data visualization tool displays the costs and harms of substance use in Canada, and offers options to filter and compare the data to better explore and understand trends and changes in how Canada spends its resources on substance use and addiction. This data is provided by Canadian Substance…

Based on the poem January by Sadiqa Khan, January is a visual exploration of a fox's imagined journey through the Davis Tannery Lands, a 37 acre brownfield site on the shore of the Rideau River in Kingston, Ontario. The poem was read by Sadiqa Khan and recorded by Matt Rogalsky. The music featured…

Phase 2 of the Between the Sand residency was a public installation at the Modern Fuel ARC. The work was showcased for the first time alongside the sand coloumn used in the lab. This was a chance for the local community to meet the research group, the residency organizers and the artist to disuss…

Multiloop is forward modelling software that helps geophysicists visualize electromagnetic responses from conductive meshes. This software is mainly used as a consulting tool that models data collected in the field and compares this to synthetic responses. By carefully noting the differences…

Visitations and Revisitations is a series of four pieces by Matt Rogalsky, that was performed live at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts. Visuals for each performance featured a number of new algorithms including a circular representation of audio waveforms as well as several flowers…

Writing custom web-based projection mapping and music visualization software is a pastime of mine. At the Summer Solstice Festival north of Toronto, the software made an all night appearance in June 2017, and then again in June 2018. As Dan Brown, one of the festival organizers for the Root Stage…

Between the Sand started as artist residency in Dr. Kevin Mumford's Research Lab at the Department of Civil Engineering at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. It was organized, facilitated and hosted in collaboration with Art the Science. This was an immersive residency lasting two…

Community Flow was created to bring together artworks from eight communities on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes. Each community had an artist work alongside volunteers to create one artwork from many smaller contributions. This project was to feature each of the final artworks, as well as the…

Hyasynth Bio (Montréal, QC) contacted us to see if we would be interested in describing their industrial process they use to produce synthetic cannabis. A scroll story was created that allowed visitors to their site to follow the process from raw ingredients to finished products. One of the main…

The aim of Theory Jar was to translate scientific jargon into lay language. I was responsible for scraping text to build a corpora, and processed this using Python's Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). With this accomplished, a mySQL database was connected to a web application that could accept any…

Writing custom web-based projection mapping and music visualization software is a pasttime of mine. This particular projection mapping and audio visualization project had 138 vertcial slats of wood, to be mapped at the Rehearsal Hall of the Isabel Bader Centre of Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario…

28,000 tuberculosis (TB) sample entries were extracted from the NCBI Database in order to better understand the wide array of descriptors entered at the time these samples were uploaded. A custom frequency-based word cloud was created from all 322 descriptors to highlight the difficulty in…

This is a web application that plots electromagnetic (EM) responses from imported files. Referred to simply as "plotter", it is now used as a consulting tool and by clients to plot time domain UTEM data in a web browser. Plotter needed to be capable of plotting downhole and surface data, and orient…

Depth to Water was created for the 17th Canadian National Conference on Drinking Water in Ottawa, Ontario to showcase how 367,089 private-well water data points can map the geography of Southern Ontario, Canada. Additionally, Depth to Water displays the depth at which water was found for each well…

As part of Tone Deaf 14, a projection show was performed by Decomposing Pianos at the Isabel Bader Centre of Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario. For this performance, custom code was developed to map the wooden panels behind the main stage. This software went on to become a versatile tool for web…

This project features T.S. Elliot's 1925 poem The Hollow Men as read in unison by a trio of computer voices. The audio was produced with an accompanying video and projected onto three dancers. It was part of Chipped Off's Waste Away, at the Black Box Studio Theatre, Isabel Bader Centre of Performing…

This is a piano remix of a track by the Fences, a recording project conceptualized by mental health crisis workers Chris Trimmer and Richard Tyo, who each hold a deep interest in the relation of music to mental health. In this project, they worked with members of their community to write songs…

In 2011, Decomposing Pianos met and chronologically depicted 88 individuals to correspond to each key of the piano. The first twenty portraits were displayed at the State of Flux Gallery on March 26, 2011 to showcase the work in progress. The display featured groups of portraits connected to…

This is a live performance by Decomposing Pianos at the Modern Fuel ARC, the last show before moving from their downtown location at 21A Queen Street. This performance featured a 30 thousand pixel long cityscape rolling by under a microbial sky. The visuals were operated by a QWERTY keyboard, with…

Set to the track 29/12/11 from Danielle Lennon's String Theory, this video features the changing seasons looking west along Lake Ontario. To build the video, over 4000 water colour sketches were sequentially added to a single sheet of cold press paper. Some of the challenges encountered in making…

Originally created for an exhibition with the Agitated Plovers Salon, Intersection went on to win the Canadian Urbanism Award at the Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF) in September 2014, and was subsequently displayed across Toronto Subway stations in May 2015. Randomly displaying images from a set…

This is a live screening that took place at the Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario. It features visual 3D radio clips on the meaning of music, as collected by my friend and colleague Chris Trimmer. 3D space is navigated using three.js pointer lock controls. Audio is emitted using webAudio panner…

This visualizer was originally intended to present chords and tones for the Decomposing Pianos project 88 Years. An interactive piano keyboard was made using HTML5 canvas such that sounds could be played and portraits displayed. This evolved into an experimentation phase in javascript, where several…

o1sound was an hour long weekly radio show on CFRC 101.9 FM, Queen's University Campus Community radio during the summer of 2008 and 2009. During the week incidental events were recorded as they happened. The results were edited, and played back every Tuesday morning after the BBC world news. The…

This is a radio piece about the story of a piano at the Queen's University Grad Club for many years. The piano suffered a broken leg when it was moved over a doorstep to participate in a show across the hall. Unrepairable, the broken piano was placed in our backyard. Soon, the action became stiff…

Decomposing Pianos was formed in 2009 with my partner and long time collaborator Julia Krolik, named after an old piano resting in our backyard. The action was stiff and unusable, so we removed it and painted the strings for its centennial anniversary, the first of three installation performaces…

TimKnightUs started as an outlet for experimental music and sound design between friends. When one of its members moved to the West Coast, concerts were performed through Skype as a way of maintaining our long distance relationship. TimKnightUs is about technology bringing people closer together…

The Agnes Etherington Art Gallery at Queen's University has a Steinway you can play on weekends. One hot afternoon on the summer solstice I paid them a visit. There were two other people in the climate-controlled gallery, and they took to listening near the end of the performance. The piano was…

Recorded at a cottage on Buck Lake in early spring. An upright piano was played between bouts of skating and wandering in the woods. Two microphones were connected to the left and right channels of my grandfather's tape deck. This recording marks my first experiments in singing since the Toronto…

This was recorded at the Common Ground Café at Queen's University a month before graduating from their Applied Science program. A grand piano was moved to the second floor for the occasion. For those familiar with the common ground as it is now, it may be important to note this was recorded in 200…

The Whispering Gallery is a solo piano album I released after moving away from home to study engineering at Queen's University. The painting on the cover is Bespoken by my mother, Emma Hesse, the jacket design by my father, Don Fernley. I am forever changed and changing.