Australian Creative Technologist
Mic Black
inventor. artist. composer
Work: future of food
Currently, I am pioneering a form of Variable Electric Field (VEF™) stimulation on plants and fungi for the future of global food production, biofuels and food safety.
I have co-founded the startup ‘Rainstick’ to commercialise this technology, working on high value vegetables and broad acre cropping.
This work combines a lifetime of seemingly unrelated learnings into a deep intuition for the subject. It feels like a whole new field of scientific inquiry yet strangely familiar at the same time.
Involvement
Co-founder
Field
DSP + electronics + AI
Project
Rainstick™
Year
2022
Community: tech for good
In 2021 I worked with an incredible team to develop mental health first aid-aware AI to work with young people. Bringing together ethicists, programmers, practitioners, and genuine community engagement to build from the ground up has been extraordinarily fulfilling.
This natural language technology has been piloted with major sporting leagues in the UK through to rural and remote communities in Western Australia and indigenous communities in Far North Queensland.
I hope this technology will continue to provide accessible support to individuals and the support services that work so hard to do what they do.
Involvement
Creator + Project lead
Field
AI + NLP + chatbot
Project
Kuvira™
Year
2022
Creative: Music producing
Electronic music
I’ll say it, I’m in love with Ableton. No music production tool has helped me to stay in creative flow like it. I love collaborations with talented artists, especially when their vision and style differs from what I would compose on my own.
Traditional music
As my day to day is always so surrounded by technology, and my music producing is too, I love the complete unplugged experience of taking my classical guitar into nature and composing.
Engagement: Pixel Mosaic
It has been a long time coming but I’m so excited to see Pixel Mosaic back on display and inspiring new people at the Queensland AI Hub and Startup Precinct in Brisbane.
Reaching thousands of young people from 74+ communities, Pixel Mosaic has been a touring success and a beautiful opportunity to encourage people to tell their stories in colour and light.
The new location for Pixel Mosaic provides entirely new opportunities for expression as we ponder how AI challenges what has been considered innately human expression.
work: provectus algae
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Provectus Algae is a novel biotech company using highly accurate light wavelengths and timings to encourage biological effects in microalgae. The goal was to treat algae as a platform to grow specialty compounds for medicine, food and industry.
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I co-founded Provectus Algae as the CTO and key technology provider throughout the first 2 years. The company electronics were built on my timing-accurate lighting control technology under license.I helped to raise capital, steer the company narrative toward bigger goals and work on all aspects of being a founder not only novel technology
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Working with UNSW, Visual Metrics and space legent Tim Parsons, we launched a meat pie into the sky and engaged with enthusiastic communities across rural NSW as well as young people from Ronald MacDonald House and several space programs.
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I lead the engineering teams and engaged multiple communities in open conversations about the future of humankind as a spacefaring species.
Engagement: Mind Match
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We encouraged hundreds of participants to play a game of competitive mindfulness. Using consumer EEG headsets and an alpha-asymmetry-based algorithm, participants played a game of mental tug-of-war whilst being distracted with sounds to see who could out-meditate the other. The goal was to show it is possible to find a state of focus and calm no matter the environment.
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This was a passion project for me combining years of BCI enthusiast exploration. I worked with researchers to develop the algorithm, wrote the code with another developer and presented this experience. Since then I have spoken about this project on stages around the world.
Previous activities
community: pie in the sky
Living in paradise
I am blessed to build novel technology whilst living in tropical Far North Queensland / Gimuy Yidinji and Yirikandji country. When I’m not in the lab, or on the farm, you’ll find me SCUBA diving on the reef or writing music overlooking a postcard view.