Creative technologist · Vancouver Island

Twenty years of building things that run.

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.

See the workGet in touch

I am the Monkey. AI is the Bot.

Selected work

2026
The Island Daily show pins: Nanaimo, Port Alberni, Tofino–Ucluelet, Campbell River and Cowichan Valley.

Island Daily

Daily community news podcasts for Vancouver Island towns, produced unattended every night and published at six in the morning. Four shows are running — Nanaimo daily since January 2026, then Port Alberni, Tofino–Ucluelet and Campbell River — 457 episodes between them so far, with Cowichan Valley branded and waiting. 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.

Local LLMTTS457 episodesUnattended nightly
Listen
2026
The Valencia aground in broken water, the reef and forested shore beyond.

Valencia

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.

BlenderLidarArchival research
2026
An amber Mandelbrot set rendered with CRT scanlines and an iteration counter.

Generative visuals

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.

GenerativeRealtimeAudio-visual
2018–present
The LimaCharlie wordmark.

LimaCharlie · Mountain View, California

Co-founded in April 2018, Chief Creative Officer since March 2022, on the board since July 2023. LimaCharlie gives security teams full control of their own infrastructure: detection and response, automation, fewer vendors, and capability you rent for as long as you need it rather than buy by the seat. AI-native, 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.

Co-founderChief Creative OfficerAI automationPlatform
Visit LimaCharlie
2022–26
The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast mark.

The Cybersecurity Defenders Podcast · LimaCharlie

352 episodes since October 2022, produced end to end: raw tape in, finished show out. 156 of them are interviews, with more than 130 named guests from around ninety organisations, alongside 45 editions of the live Defender Fridays series. Four years of a weekly show is its own kind of engineering — the pipeline that makes Island Daily possible started here, by hand.

Audio post production352 episodesWeekly since 2022
Listen
2022–present
The Cybersecurity Cares mark: a shield with a heart.

Cybersecurity Cares

Founded it. A grassroots volunteer effort that pulls the security community together to raise money for people in need — CAD $130,119 in its first two years, running sponsored streamathons and pointing the proceeds at Becky’s Fund and its work on domestic violence. The industry has plenty of conferences; it has fewer ways to be useful to someone having the worst year of their life.

FounderVolunteer$130,119 raised
2024
The MSSN CTRL identity: the name glowing yellow on black over scanlines, with the dates and venue boxed beside it.

MSSN CTRL · LimaCharlie · Arlington, VA

A three-day security engineering and automation conference, built and run by a small team I was part of from ideation through to the week itself. The website was the piece I took particular care over — design and build both, in the same terminal register as the event: yellow on black, scanlines, everything framed like something you would find in a mission control room.

Event brandWeb design & buildThree days
Visit the site
2014–22
The Startups Care mark: a paint can with a heart on it.

Startups Care

The same idea, eight years earlier and pointed at the startup community instead. Over its run it raised just under CAD $250,000 and 12,000 lbs of food for people in need. It wound up in 2022; Cybersecurity Cares is what it became.

FounderVolunteer$250,000 and 12,000 lbs
2016–19
Carmanah Digital Creative's header art: a figure on the rocks of an open coast, pale beams across the sky.

Carmanah Digital Creative

My own boutique software shop — a small creative agency for, in its own words, “creative and innovative applications of technology”. In practice that meant the briefs that did not fit a template: client applications, connected hardware, and IoT work with BLE, mesh networking and embedded devices back when that was still speculative. The shop listed Charles and Ray Eames among its heroes and held that software is the creative medium of our time, which tells you the register we were aiming for. Clients included ANOW, a real estate appraisal startup we built an offline-first iOS companion app for.

Boutique shopCreative technologyIoT / BLE
›More from this project·6 stills · 1 film
ANOW Mobile project tile.CBC Music project tile.Beacon Wireless project tile.Siaras project tile.Big2 project tile.Startups Care project tile.
The shop, via the Internet Archive
2017–18
The Kokalee edge networking hardware.

Kokalee

Mist computing for teams: a mobile edge networking device and software stack that pushed progressive web apps onto any device with a browser, to be used completely offline. Data synced between devices through the edge box, then back to the cloud when a connection returned. The same instinct as ANOW — assume the network is not there — pointed at a whole team rather than one app.

Edge computingPWAMesh sync
Source on GitHub
2016
Four frames of a portrait redrawn by style transfer, with the training loss scrolling beneath.

Neural artistic style transfer

Large-format neural artistic style transfer on high-end NVIDIA hardware, in CUDA and Python. The project this company is named after, and where I first wrote down the idea it runs on: an AI process that is curated by a human.

CUDAPythonNeural style transfer
›More from this project·2 stills
A portrait redrawn in high-chroma style transfer.
The same portrait in a painterly oil treatment.
2016–17
The CBC Music artist browser shown on desktop, tablet and phone.

Music Artist Pages · CBC

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.

AzureREST APITeam lead
›More from this project·1 still
An individual artist page across desktop, tablet and phone.
2016
The Dark and Other Love Stories cover: bare trees against a deep blue night.

Three Love Stories · with Deborah Willis

An audio triptych made with the Canadian author Deborah Willis, in support of the 2017 publication of her second book, The Dark and Other Love Stories. She read three of the stories; I recorded the sessions and did the post-production. Released under Monkey and Bot — the name was already doing this kind of work the same year the style transfer gave it its meaning.

Audio recordingPost productionLiterary
Listen on SoundCloud
2014–15
The Séances title card, a figure dissolving into the dark behind it.

Séances · National Film Board of Canada

Interactivity prototypes for Guy Maddin's Séances, built in iOS against the GPUImage framework, working through how a film might be assembled differently for every viewer.

iOSGPUImageInteraction designPre-AI
See Séances
2011–16
Kashoo's cloud accounting ledger open on a laptop, as it looked in 2013.

Kashoo · Simple Cloud Accounting

Five years as Software Developer and Technical Marketer at one of the first companies to put accounting in the cloud. I joined when it was a handful of people around a single table and filled whatever role the week needed; by the end the team was twenty-seven people with ten thousand paying customers. It took ‘most promising start-up’ at the 2012 BC Technology Industry Association awards.

Cloud accountingEarly-stagePre-AI
2012

Interactive Twitter Wall · Illuminate Yaletown

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, drew press coverage in Metro Vancouver, and later featured at the BC chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Audience dataReal-timeInstallationPre-AI
2011
The Our World energy exhibit in the gallery, its ring of buttons and screens lit.

Our World interactive exhibit · Science World

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.

ProcessingHardwareStill installedPre-AI
›More from this project·2 stills
The exhibit's central column in the gallery.The timer and energy-remaining readout.
2010
The 40-metre Olympic rings lit over the water at night.

40-metre Olympic ring light show · Vancouver 2010

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.

ProcessingLighting controlLivePre-AI
›More from this project·1 still · 1 film
The ring geometry simulated before the shows ran.
Watch the light show
2010
The 16-panel LED wall behind a crowded dance floor.

Wolfgang Gartner stage show · Gossip, Vancouver

Madrix effect scripts for a custom 16-panel LED wall, run for eighteen shows through the 2010 Olympics.

MadrixLED18 showsPre-AI
›More from this project·1 still · 1 film
A Madrix effect script previewed on the 16-panel grid.
Watch a set
2010
Light trails drawn across a darkened studio window at night.

Responsive storefront

An OpenCV experiment that made the window of an old studio space react to whoever walked past it. No brief, no client — just wanting to know whether it would work.

OpenCVComputer visionInstallationPre-AI
Watch the window
2007–08
Photographs scattered across a desktop as captioned polaroids.

Snapshots

A screensaver and photo browser built on the Facebook platform, back when that platform was new. It pulled your friends’ newest photographs down to your machine and scattered them across the desktop one at a time, captions and all; in browsing mode you could read through their recent albums, tags and descriptions, and comment without opening a browser. Shipped and maintained through v1.4.1, including 64-bit support.

Facebook platformREST APIsDesktop appPre-AI
›More from this project·2 stills
The Snapshots image browser with a friend's albums listed.Screensaver mode, photos scattering across the desktop.
2006
A modelled underwater surface rendered as a red relief map.

Soundmap · University of Victoria

Bathymetric maps of underwater surfaces from off-the-shelf parts: a GPS and a sonar, married on their timestamps by a best-fit algorithm, then turned into heat maps and triangulated irregular networks. A directed studies credit I took in my final year of university, built for under $500 of hardware. The method later went to a search and rescue team in England and a river engineer in Costa Rica.

Sonar + GPSMathematical modellingUnder $500Pre-AI
›More from this project·2 stills
The same surface as a triangulated irregular network.The raw GPS and sonar tracks before fitting.

Also

  • Sangari Global Education — an Android interactive book reader for teachers

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 co-founding LimaCharlie, 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.

Based
Vancouver Island, Canada
Building since
2006
Working with AI since
2016
Engagements
Project, or ongoing retainer

Get in touch

Tell me what you want running without hiring for it.

Bring the outcome, not the spec. If it isn't something I should build, I'll say so.

hello@monkeyandbot.com