Creative technologist · Vancouver Island
Installations, broadcast systems, films and automation — public art for the Olympics, 47,111 artist profiles for the CBC, and now pipelines that research, write and publish on their own. Since 2016 the machine does the volume and a human holds the judgment.
I am the Monkey. AI is the Bot.
Selected work
Eight daily community news podcasts for Vancouver Island towns, produced unattended every night and published at six in the morning. Fetch, dedupe, classify, draft, script, proofread, voice, assemble, publish — a local LLM does the volume, a human signs off on what ships. Runs on a Mac Mini against a GPU box; distribution through Transistor.
An animated black-and-white film about the 1906 wreck of the SS Valencia, built where she actually lies. The coast is 1 m lidar of the real site; the surf is photographic plates masked by measured water depth, so white water only appears where the sea is shallow enough to break; the crowd's faces are solved from portraits by fitting MediaPipe landmarks onto MakeHuman targets rather than randomised.
Forty short pieces where the mathematics is the image: a double pendulum drawing its own phase space, spectral geometry, a Mandelbrot zoom rendered to look like it is coming off a phosphor screen. Made to sit alongside generated audio rather than illustrate it.
On-device object detection and traffic analytics for Apple Silicon. YOLO for detection, ByteTrack for association, CLIP embeddings to recognise a repeat visitor. Everything stays on the machine — no account, no API key, no telemetry back to a vendor — and the events can feed a SIEM.
AI-native detection and response, sold to managed service providers. Automation applied to a domain where being wrong is expensive — which is the best possible training for building pipelines people actually trust.
A long-running habit rather than a project: turning video into type, four times over, each one a different take on the same problem. The kind of thing that teaches you more about colour, luminance and perception than any brief ever commissions.
Large-format neural artistic style transfer on high-end NVIDIA hardware, in CUDA and Python. The project where I first wrote down the idea this company runs on: an AI process that is curated by a human.
Migrated 47,111 artist profiles — text, images and audio — onto Azure and exposed them through a REST API. Led a small team building both the public client and the admin CMS from the CBC's designs.
A gamified public wall: certain words in a tweet triggered animations, the crowd could upload photos, and real-time moderation kept it safe. It captured audience data for follow-up, and later featured at the BC chapter of the American Marketing Association.
Sixteen monitors, fourteen buttons and a dynamic RGB LED display, teaching kids about energy consumption. Java and Processing, with a PHP and MySQL admin so Science World staff could retune the game themselves.
Eight light shows for the giant LED Olympic rings, generated in Processing and driven through PBA Engineering's control system. Delivered against a timeline that did not move.
Also
Who you'd be working with
I'm Chris Carson. Computer science at the University of Victoria, then twenty years building software — freelance, in agencies, and as a founder.
The work has swung between hardware, interaction design, data and brand: Olympic light shows, museum exhibits, a national broadcaster's music archive, films, and a security platform whose whole job is automating decisions that matter. That range is unusual, and it's the point — the pipelines worth building sit across all of it.
You work with me. Not a team I subcontract, and not a junior running the account.
Get in touch
Bring the outcome, not the spec. If it isn't something I should build, I'll say so.
hello@monkeyandbot.com