About Jeff

First Person Bio

Born in 1703 to a kind peasant family in feudal Japan, I made my way to Hawaii at the age of fourteen by lashing together soda bottles into a raft and setting sail. When I eventually washed ashore in a missile range on the West coast of Kauai, I got a job calibrating guidance systems by fabricating a resume and charming the hiring manager. On my off time, I had several memorable romances with adventurous tourist girls and taught myself Russian. I developed a taste for pork and pineapple. I amassed a fortune when I invented the head-mounted umbrella, and after three years of traveling the globe and living a life of leisure, I was conned by four Australian men in Brussels who claimed to be financing a film about the life of the Greek philosopher, Lucretius, a personal hero of mine.

With no money and no passport, I decided to try my hand at politics, and quickly climbed the political ranks in the small Ganshoren municipality by stoking the fires of a small independence movement, which eventually led to a full-scale civil war, but in the process made many enemies, and eventually was forced to apply for asylum in the United States. During this process, I fled to Paris, where I lived in a commune who believed that the American painter, Bob Ross, was a prophet, and was compiling a holy text based on his television program. I was able to de-program several of the members and led them to the port city of Dakar in Senegal, where we boarded a tanker ship bound for the US. After a month of hiding from the Senegalese sailors in the boiler room of the ship, we arrived in New York.

Third Person Bio

Jeff Crouse creates software and installations that are equal parts humor, absurdity and technology. Jeff’s previous work includes YouThreebe, a YouTube triptych creator; Invisible Threads, a virtual jeans factory in Second Life; and James Chimpton, a robotic monkey that interviewed the artists of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. He is currently developing BoozBot, a bar tending robot/puppet; and DeleteCity, a Wordpress plug-in that finds and republishes content that has been taken down from sites such as Flickr and YouTube. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Futuresonic festival in Manchester, UK, the DC FilmFest, and the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam.

Jeff received his MS from the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech in 2006 and then joined Eyebeam as a production fellow in 2007. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam and a teacher at the IMA program at Hunter College.