Why Creative Technologists Are Hackers
There are a million ways to draw a circle.
You can use your left hand — it'll come out wobbly, a little unpredictable, and full of character. You can trace the bottom of a coffee cup — precise, clean, mechanical. You can use a compass, a stencil, a string tied to a pencil, or a piece of software that generates a mathematically perfect curve. Every method produces a circle. And every method gives that circle a completely different personality.
Painters have understood this for centuries. The tool matters. The technique matters. The way you hold the brush changes the meaning of the mark. Master painters didn't just learn one way to draw a circle — they invented new ways, broke old rules, and found personality in process.
Creative technologists do the same thing. Except our brush is code, and our canvas is hardware, light, projection, sensors, and whatever else we can get our hands on. And just like painters, we are — at our core — hackers. Not the kind that break into systems. The kind that break systems open to find new uses for them.
What I Mean By Hacker
Let me define my terms, because the word "hacker" carries a lot of baggage.
I don't mean someone in a hoodie cracking passwords in a dark basement. I mean the original sense of the word: someone who takes a tool built for one purpose and bends it into something else. Someone who looks at a technology and asks, "What was this designed to do?" and then immediately asks, "What else could it do?"
That second question is where all the interesting work lives.
I taught myself to code in coffee shops while on tour with bands. I had started as an intern at Echo Park, a music venue in LA, and ended up on the road doing lighting design, stage design, and tour management. The stage computers needed to talk to each other — lighting rigs, audio systems, video feeds — and I needed them to do things they weren't built to do. So I sat in coffee shops between shows and taught myself to write the code that made it happen.
How I Taught Myself To Code In Coffee Shops On Tour
I wasn't following a curriculum. I wasn't learning computer science theory. I was hacking — taking tools designed for one workflow and forcing them into another because the show demanded it. That approach has defined my entire career.
Painters Invent Techniques. So Do Coders.
Here's what people outside the creative technology world don't always understand: writing code for art is nothing like writing code for a bank or an e-commerce site.
When a software engineer builds a payment system, the goal is reliability. The code should do exactly the same thing every time, under every condition. Predictability is the point.
When I write code for The Table 30A's projection system, predictability is the enemy. I want surprise. I want organic movement. I want the visuals to feel alive, not computed. So I take the same programming languages, the same hardware, the same fundamental technology — and I use it the wrong way. On purpose.
A painter who discovers that dragging a dry brush across wet paint creates a specific texture hasn't made a mistake. They've invented a technique. When I discover that feeding sensor data through a function designed for something completely different creates an unexpected visual behavior, I haven't written a bug. I've found a new way to draw a circle.
This is what connects creative technologists to every artist who has ever picked up a tool and thought, "I wonder what happens if I use this differently."
The Story Behind 10PRINT And The Art Of Generative Design
The Commodore 64 Connection
My name — 10PRINT — comes from a one-line program on the Commodore 64. The original program used two characters, a forward slash and a backslash, selected randomly and printed endlessly to the screen. Simple rules, infinite variability. The output was a generative maze that never repeated and never stopped.
That program is the purest example of what I'm talking about. The Commodore 64 wasn't designed to make art. It was a home computer built for basic computing tasks. But someone looked at it and asked, "What else can this do?" and a single line of code became one of the most studied examples of generative art in history.
Simple rules. Infinite variability. That's the hacker ethos applied to art. You don't need the most sophisticated tool. You need the most creative misuse of the tool you have.
How This Applies To The Table 30A
The Table 30A is an immersive, multi-course pop-up dining experience on Florida's 30A. Five curated courses, each paired with a chapter of an original story, served at a communal table while interactive projection responds to everything happening on the table surface. The system tracks hands, glasses, and plates and generates abstract, colorful visuals in real time.
Building this system was an exercise in hacking from start to finish.
The projection hardware I use wasn't designed for dinner tables. It was designed for conference rooms, classrooms, large-scale installations. I had to figure out how to make it work in an intimate setting — at outdoor partner spaces along 30A, on a communal table where people are eating and drinking and reaching across each other.
The tracking software wasn't designed to follow wine glasses. It was designed for hand gestures in controlled environments. I had to hack it — retrain it, reconfigure it, feed it data it wasn't expecting — to reliably detect the objects I needed it to see in the conditions I was working with.
The visual engine I use wasn't designed to tell stories. It was designed for real-time graphics. I had to break it apart and rebuild the pipeline so that the projection could evolve chapter by chapter, course by course, responding to the narrative Jose Castro and I create together for each event.
How I Design A Five Course Immersive Dinner
None of this is using technology "correctly." All of it is using technology creatively. And that's the definition of a creative technologist: someone who takes tools built for practical purposes and hacks them into instruments of art.
The Hacker Mindset In Practice
When I was working as a creative director on nighttime spectaculars at Disney, Universal, Dollywood, presidential libraries, and venues across Europe and the Middle East, I saw the hacker mindset in action constantly. Every project started with a constraint: a building that couldn't be modified, a budget that didn't cover the "right" equipment, a timeline that made the conventional approach impossible.
The conventional approach was never the interesting one anyway.
The interesting work always came from the team members who looked at the constraint and said, "Okay, so the standard solution won't work. What will?" Those were the hackers. They weren't breaking rules for the sake of it. They were breaking rules because the creative vision demanded it.
I've carried that mindset into The Table 30A. It's a two-person operation — I handle the show, Jose Castro handles the food. We don't have the budget of a theme park or the team of a major production company. What we have is the hacker ethos: take what's available, push it past its intended purpose, and create something that feels impossible with the resources we actually have.
Why This Matters For The Future
I grew up in South Walton. I left at seventeen because there wasn't enough creative opportunity. When I came back, I saw the Emerald Coast as what I call the wild west for digital art — wide open space to build something new, to develop local talent, to keep young creatives from having to leave the way I did.
The hacker mindset is essential to that vision. You don't build a creative ecosystem by waiting for perfect tools and unlimited budgets. You build it by teaching people to look at what they have and ask, "What else can this do?"
The future I'm working toward is portable systems, multiple teams, bringing immersive experiences to homes and backyards along 30A. That future doesn't require million-dollar installations. It requires hackers — creative technologists who can take accessible tools and make art with them.
Every painter who ever found a new way to drag a brush was a hacker. Every musician who detuned a guitar to discover a new sound was a hacker. Every creative technologist who writes code that does something beautiful with technology built for spreadsheets is a hacker.
The circle always gets drawn. The question is how you draw it. And the personality of that circle — wobbly, precise, surprising, alive — is where the art lives.
How A Two Person Team Produces An Immersive Dining Show
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a creative technologist?
A creative technologist is someone who uses technology — code, hardware, sensors, projection, and other digital tools — as a medium for creative expression. Rather than building software for practical business purposes, creative technologists hack tools into instruments of art, finding unexpected uses for technology originally designed for other functions.
How does the hacker mindset apply to The Table 30A?
Every piece of technology used at The Table 30A was originally designed for a different purpose. The projection hardware, the tracking software, the visual engine — all of it has been reconfigured and repurposed to work in the context of an intimate dinner experience. This creative misuse of available tools is the hacker mindset in practice.
What does the name 10PRINT mean?
10PRINT comes from a famous one-line program on the Commodore 64 home computer. The program randomly printed two characters to the screen endlessly, creating a generative maze from simple rules. It represents the core philosophy behind my work: simple rules can produce infinite variability, and creative misuse of a basic tool can generate genuine art.
Do you need to understand code to enjoy The Table 30A?
Not at all. The technical work happens behind the scenes. As a guest, all you experience is the result — interactive projection that responds to your movements, your gestures, and the objects on the table in real time. The hacking is invisible. The art is what you see and feel.
How did touring with bands lead to creative technology?
Working on tour, I needed stage computers — lighting rigs, audio systems, video feeds — to communicate with each other in ways they weren't designed to. I taught myself to code to solve that problem, sitting in coffee shops between shows. That hands-on, problem-solving approach to technology became the foundation of my entire career in interactive art and immersive experiences.
