About
My name is Greg Borenstein. I'm an artist, musician, hardware hacker, programmer, and student at NYU ITP in New York City.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and moved to Portland to attend Reed College in the late nineties. I studied art history, drawing, painting, music, and math.
After a few years of supporting myself with fancy food service jobs while playing music, I learned how to program in Ruby and quit my day job to become a web programming contractor using Ruby on Rails. From 2007-2008, I ran a start-up web music search engine with Chris Anderson called Grabb.it. After that crashed and burned, I worked building Facebook apps for clients at the Stepchange interactive agency until moving to New York in August of 2009.
I currently attend grad school for interactive art and technology at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program where I make translucent things, squishy robots, bad special effects, machine art, and miniature everything.
(photo by the great Chika Iijima)
Here's some of the stuff I've done:
Projects
- Face Fight: 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. Selected for the ITP Winter Show 2009. Appeared briefly in the Frontline: Digital Nation documentary.
- Infone: A tool for rapid surveying of local conditions by text message with incentives for participation, developed in partnership with UNICEF for a class at ITP.
- Grabb.it: Music search engine and mp3 blog community, I co-founded. Went offline in 2009
- At Dusk: Indie rock band with two friends from high school that was together for 10 years. We made four records and toured across nations.
- PDX Pop Now!: Non-profit organization dedicated to advancing access to music in Portland, Oregon. We put on an annual three-day free all-ages music festival of all local music and put out a double disc compilation as well as putting on shows in local middle and high schools. I was a founding board member.
- Music For Dozens: Like Flickr for music; anyone can upload music they made, share it around the web in our flash widget, and sell it for download or on CD.
- Bottlecap Labs: A short-lived but delightful group of smart geeks in Portland who meet once a week to hack on cool random ideas. Our only public project was ZombieURL RAWWWWR.
Code
- github.com/atduskgreg
- RAD: Ruby Arduino Development: Framework for programming the Arduino microcontroller platform in Ruby.
- Ruby Thumbnail Gem: Ruby wrapper for the Amazon Alexa Web Thumbnail API.
Random
- Largehearted Goat: Analysis of the unhealthy obsession of MP3 blogger Largehearted Boy with the band the Mountain Goats
- The NY Times Explains The Ratings: A compilation of movie summaries drawn from the NY Times' articulation of their ratings.
- The Quotable Dan-O: a compilation of memorable sayings from ITP's own Dan O'Sullivan.
