Greg Borenstein is an artist, technologist, and teacher in New York. His work explores computer vision and visual effects as a medium for storytelling and design. He is passionate about transforming advanced technical research into creative tools: tickling the tips of these icebergs of technology so that they laugh a little.

Greg is a graduate of the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program and has worked for firms such as Makerbot and Berg London. He is the author of a book for O'Reilly about the Microsoft Kinect, titled: Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot

Work

We Make the Weather is an interactive installaton created for New Cinema program hosted by Eyebeam and The Creator's Project. Inspired by Hurricane Sandy, it uses seam carving, breath detection, motion capture, and the Unity game engine to poetically explore the human impact on the environment. Read more.

ofxaddons.com aggregates more than 700 community-created extensions to the OpenFrameworks creative coding toolkit created in collaboration with James George.

Machine Pareidolia is an experiment in the differences between human and machine vision. It applies a face tracking algorithm to images of inanimate objects that trigger human pareidolia. Read more. (Press: NBC, The Verge, The Atlantic, interview on Big Picture Science)

Monolith is a stop-motion music video for the band Soars made with Calli Higgins. This video was selected for the Southside and New Media film festivals.

The Valley of Heart's Delight: Tinkle Toy is a multimedia installation that uses special effects as an artistic medium to construct an absurd and eccentric monument to the origins of the personal computer.

'LO': October 29, 1969 is a multimedia monument to the birth of the internet.

Running of the Bulls is an electromechanical game built with Scott Wayne Indiana that lets you participate in a tiny version of the Festival of Sanfermines.

Homunculus is a video self-portrait that explores facial expressions and physical performance. In it, I use the position of my body to puppet a 3D model of my own head.

Face Fight is a collaborative drawing machine that allows two players to physically wrestle over control of a line in order to create a single drawing of both of their faces. More about Face Fight.

Physical GIF is a collaborative design project with Scott Wayne Indiana. It turns animated GIFs into magical tabletop toys. With a laser cutter and a strobe we give GIFs life off the screen. Follow Physical GIF on Kickstarter.

Open is a 30-second animated short about the adventures of a corkscrew. Hand drawn in Flash.

Tabula Rasa is a video meditation on the quiet of late night New York streets. It uses the music of Arvo Part and a composited miniature to reflect the beauty and calm of the midnight city.

Drift is a simple text editor that stores your documents as GitHub Gists so that they're always backed up and easily shared, built with Devin Chalmers and currently available in the App Store. More about Drift.

KAMAS: the Kinect Abnormal Motion Assessment System. A software system dedicated to automating the detection and tracking of movement disorders using the Microsoft Kinect. Winner of the national Health 2.0 Developer Challenge 2011. More about KAMAS.

Book

Greg is the author of Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot, released by O'Reilly Media on January 12, 2012. The book uses the Processing creative coding environment to introduce readers to the basics of working with depth cameras, from basic pixel processing to drawing 3D point clouds and working with user-tracking skeleton data.

The book includes projects and introductory concepts in a wide range of application areas made possible by the Kinect: gestural interfaces, 3D scanning for fabrication, and robotic vision.

Making Things See is available in print and electronic forms in bookstores, from Amazon, and directly from O'Reilly.

Code

Greg is proficient in a number of programming languages including Ruby, JavaScript, Java/Processing, C++ (for graphics with OpenFrameworks and for embedded systems with Arduino), and Objective-C. He has extensive experience in web programming including server- and client-side work for both his own startups and for an extensive list of clients. He also has experience creating and running open source projects including a few with a significant community of contributors. Below are the most prominent examples:

  • OpenCVPro
    A Processing wrapper for the widely-used OpenCV computer vision library. Work on this library has been generously supported by the Processing Foudnation.
  • Finger Tracker
    A Processing library that does real-time finger-tracking from depth images, for example from the Kinect.
  • PSVM
    A Processing library providing access to libsvm for the Support Vector Machine learning. Includes examples for text analysis and color- and shape-based object recognition.
  • DynamicProgramming
    A Processing library implementing the Dynamic Programming optimization technique along with a number of applications including, Seam Carving and Sequence Alignment.
  • Processing-PCA
    A Processing library implementing Principal Component Analysis, a technique for finding the major axes of variance in data. Includes applications to statistical data as well as finding the orientation of 2D objects in thresholded images and 3D objects in point clouds.
  • ofxUVC
    An OpenFrameworks addon implementing the USB Unviersal Video Class spec for camera control.
  • Ruby Arduino Development (RAD)
    A system for programming the Arduino microcontroller using Ruby. Created in 2008. It has a thriving community and is now maintained by others.
  • Oled
    An Arduino library for working with OLED screens.
  • TabSweeper
    A MacRuby app that helps you close your browser tabs and submit them to Instapaper and Pinboard.
  • jMacs
    A user-modifiable network-aware editor in Javascript and REST. Implemented with jQuery and Sinatra.
  • Spiffy Bird
    A bridge between the Songbird music player webpage API and the JSON Shareable Playlist Format.

Writing

Exhibits

  • 2012
    PULSE: Art and Technology Festival, Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA
  • 2011
    FORMAT, The Luminary Center for the Arts, St. Louis, MO
  • 2011
    New Media Film Festival
  • 2011
    Southside Film Festival
  • 2011
    It Reminds Me, Ventana244
  • 2011
    Spring Show, NYU ITP
  • 2010
    Winter Show, NYU ITP
  • 2010
    Spring Show, NYU ITP
  • 2009
    Winter Show, NYU ITP

Talks

Past

  • Inaugural Paperless Post Tech Talk
    New York, NY April, 2012
  • PULSE: Art and Technology Festival
    Savannah, GA, 27 February - 4 March, 2012 at Telfair Museum.
  • Art && Code 3D
    Pittsburgh, PA 21-23 October 2011 at CMU
  • Maker Faire NYC
    New York 17-18 September 2011 at New York Hall of Science.
  • Intro to the Kinect: Gestural Interfaces
    Taught at ITP Camp 2011 (notes, code, and slides)
  • Control Emacs with Your Beard: the All-Singing All-Dancing Intro to Hacking the Kinect
    Presented June 21, 2011 at OS Bridge. (notes, code, and slides)
  • Body Tracking with the Kinect
    Presented at Health 2.0 Boston. (slides and notes)
  • Looking up at the MJT and David Wilson Interview
    . Presented at Modern Languages Association Conference, 2011 (slides and notes)
  • Don't Lose Your Shit: On Version Control and Backups
    Presented at NYU ITP, 2010. (notes and slides)
  • Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions
    Presented at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference, 2009 with Jeremiah Axelrod. (video)
  • Arduino is Rails for Hardware hacking
    Presented at Golden Gate Ruby Conference, 2009. (video)
  • Giving Rails the Big 'F': Surviving Facebook Integration Unscarred
    Presented at RailsConf, 2009. (talk description)
  • Ruby Arduino Development
    Presented at RubyConf, 2008. (video)

Comics