August Black presenting art papers at SIGGRPAH 2024 in Denver, Colorado.
August Black presenting the Art Papers @ SIGGRAPH 2024, Denver Colorado. photo by John Fujii © 2024 ACM SIGGRAPH
August Black in white protective suit standing in front of a large white table with lights on it and a project of superworms behind him.
August Black in residency @ Evans School October 2024, Denver Colorado.
photo by Nima Bahrehmand © 2024
August Black headshot in stereo-ish
Office portrait in stereo, summer 2024.
August Black and Nima Bahrehmand in "team critcal" custom made athletic jerseys with camo print.
August Black and his first PhD advisee, Nima Bahrehmand,on "team critical" outside the offices of DCMP (and the ROTC), under the football stadium bleachers (July 5, 2023).
August Black presenting Mezcal via video link to the Ars Acoustica group o the European Broadcasting Union.
August Black presenting his radio work via video link to the Ars Acoustica group of the European Broadcasting Union. Geneva, Switzerland 2022.
Two photos of August Black, one in gray long sleeve shirt with blue sky behind, another portrait shot from below and looking upwards with T-shirt that says ‘resist’
Left: California, 2022. Right: PIF Camp, Slovenia 2022.
Photo of August Black from behind with blue shirt and dark pants, talking to a group seated on benches under a red tent.
August Black conducting a mezcal workshop at PIF Camp 2022 in Soča, Slovenia
self-portraits in two separate fancy bathrooms
I have a fondness for self-portraits in fancy bathrooms.
Three photos of August Black, one in an art museaum dressing black, another portrait with fava beans in mouth looking like a smile, a third with his face showing through an elephant stick mask.
Left: lookin' at aaaaaart, 2017. Middle: Our Fava Who Art in Heaven, 2015. Right: Let's talk about this elephant in the room, 2017.
Hi, I‘m August Black. I‘m a hybrid practitioner of art, design, and engineering that critically engages with techno-social systems in playful and evocative ways. I create software, systems, and spaces through experimental research in the overlapping areas of new formats, network dynamics, and virtual architectures with a focus on audio and transmission. My activities tend to evoke themes of power, migration, play, noise, chance, and operate under methods of collaboration, commons-building, and communal interaction.
My past work focused on live networked audio, mixing FM radio with user input through online software. I'm currently investigating novel ways to use global networking for local and hyper-local real-time communication.
I‘ve earned a living at various points in time as an artist, producer, graphic designer, software engineer, and educator. I‘ve had the pleasure of working at places like the ORF Kunstradio, the Ars Electronica Futurelab, the UCSB BioImaging Lab, and Cycling ’74 - the makers of Max/MSP. As an educator, I‘ve taught media-art classes at University of California Santa Barbara, University of San Francisco, and Colorado University Boulder.
I hold a Phd in Media, Arts, & Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and am currently an Assistant Professor at Colorado University Boulder in the department of Critical Media Practices.
I'm a bit old-school and am just learning to participate in the instagoogle socials and whatnot (...I know, I know), so I offer here a few serious and semi-serious images as a consolation.