Jordan Hochenbaum
Biography
Jordan Hochenbaum is a musician and multimedia artist concerned with finding meaningful connections between music, art, and technology. At a young age, Jordan developed a keen interest in the composition, and decomposition of both audio and electronics. Early in his life, computers were constantly being taken apart and reassembled, guitars smashed, and old toys and found objects circuit-bent and scrambled. While Jordan found a comforting beauty in reconfiguring the old, it wasn’t long before Jordan’s artistic desires also led him to the need of designing and creating expressive, custom devices. From a list spanning custom-made tube Theremins to the large-scale musical multi-touch interface Bricktable, Jordan’s work is informed by an eclectic background and interests in sound and technology.
Education and Current Work
Jordan is pursuing his PhD in Sonic Arts at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. In 2009, Jordan received his Bachelors of Fine Art from California Institute of the Arts, where he studied in a multidisciplinary program mixing music and technology. Jordan’s current hub of interests includes designing new musical interfaces for live performance, analog and digital electronics, multimodal sensor-systems, and playing & composing a wide range of musical genres ranging from electronic music to North Indian classical.
Jordan’s work has been featured online and in print, including Wired and XLR8R Magazine, on Processing.org, and at international festivals and conferences including the Google I/O, NASA’s Yuri’s Night, and Berlin Open 2009.
Together with long time collaborator and friend Owen Vallis, Jordan is co-founder of FlipMu. As FlipMu, Jordan and Owen have created Bricktable, a large-scale interactive multi-touch surface. FlipMu is also responsible for the Arduinome, an open-source initiative to port the popular Monome USB MIDI/OSC controller to the customizable Arduino microprocessor platform.
