J. Ferguson "Phoenix"

METABURN — The Bridge Experience

2020 · Founder & Regional Director

A free, fully immersive 3D web-based XR Burn that ran in any browser on any device — no download, no headset required. METABURN included a supervised, sandboxed all-ages area with adult guides for younger participants; the wider Multiverse it connected to was 18+. Named one of the Recognized Universes of the 2020 Burning Man Multiverse in Burning Man's own announcement film, alongside BRCvr, BURN2 and SparkleVerse.

• 11,500 participants over the event window, 30 August – 6 September 2020 (my own count, not independently published)
• Delivered on a $16,500 production budget inside an 80-day window, 40 days of active development
• Ran the full production stack: platform licensing, producer and participant agreements, scheduling and camp programming, volunteer recruitment and coordination
• Built on cloud-hosted WebXR with no-code 3D world building and an on-chain asset layer — a portal to the other seven Recognized Universes of the 2020 Multiverse: BRCvr, BURN2, Build-A-Burn, MysticVerse, SparkleVerse, Multiverse, and The Infinite Playa
• Named by Burning Man Project in its own Multiverse announcement film: “the eight recognized universes of the Burning Man multiverse — Burn2, BRCvr, the Bridge Experience, Build-A-Burn, MysticVerse, SparkleVerse, Multiverse, and the Infinite Playa.”
• Independently corroborated in Burning Man's own Journal, which names “Phoenix” as a co-creator of The Bridge Experience, and in the PlayaVR2020 credits: “Meta Burn Producers: XR Labs, Paul Bronstein, Juan Rivera, Jeffery Ferguson (Phoenix).”
• METABURN's own credits page independently lists me twice — as facilitator (“Jeff Ferguson”) and as a spotlight performer (“J Daka Phoenix”) — alongside fellow facilitators Kara Williamson, Scarlett Arana, Sergey Fedyushchenko, Tsunami and Jay Ozone, and spotlight performers including Geoff McCabe and Joseph David Nillo.
• The HBO docuseries The Man Will Burn (HBO, 2026) brought attention to the Recognized Universes of the 2020 Burning Man Multiverse, including METABURN — The Bridge Experience.

METABURN's digital home ran on Wix at metaburn.org, promoting The Bridge Experience as accessible from any Chrome browser with no VR headset required. The 3D environment itself was built in partnership with Ozone Universe, a WebXR platform — a full playa-style camp rendered in-browser: geodesic structures, a central sculpture, a live stage, and lounge areas populated by avatars.

Luminous Lotus Temple — Virtual Burning Man

2021 · Interim CTO

Served as Interim CTO for the official 2021 virtual Temple, working alongside creator-producer Simeone Scaramozzino, whose team created and produced the experience, with temple design by artist Roger Carr. Led 3D environment integration and blockchain/NFT asset development, stepping down when the blockchain/NFT integration could not be completed as scoped; the team designed and built more than was ultimately deployed.

Interactive & Augmented NFT Art Mural

2021 · Art Basel Miami · Project lead

Project lead on an augmented-reality layer over a physical mural in Downtown Miami, delivered by XR-LABS for Fly NFT's LLC across Art Basel week. Scanning a QR code at the wall launched an Instagram/Spark AR effect that used the mural itself as the image-recognition target and animated it in place — a looped overlay registered live against the painted surface, leaving the original artwork untouched. The same Art Basel week programme separately included a projection-mapping and metaverse activation with Dapper Labs at the Glozal launch party.

MetaBurn 2020 (1st NFT) — minted on Rarible

2020 · Creator “Phoenix” on Rarible

Minted and listed an NFT titled “MetaBurn 2020 (1st NFT)” on Rarible under my creator handle Phoenix, in an edition of 11. The artwork is by Joseph Nilo (credited elsewhere on this site as Joseph David Nillo). The listing's own description reads: “Welcome home to the burn family — this is the first even burningman NFT, artist Joseph Nilo!”

Meta Burn Gift Token — Burning Man's gifting tradition, released digitally

August–September 2020 · METABURN / The Bridge Experience

Camp Alien Love Nest had handed out millefiore clay pendants on the playa since 1993; for the 2020 virtual Burn, the camp worked with The Blockchain Center to issue the pendant as a crypto collectible token instead, distributed to participants through METABURN. Camp founder Geoff “Fusion” McCabe designed the digital version. In my own contemporaneous account, written days after the event: “We released not just the 1st but also the second non fungible tokens (NFT)'s on the blockchain at burning man events as gifts… With Geoff McCabe the first person to bring the gifting principle to burning man 20+ years ago.” The second token, Dream Tank's DreamCoinz — an Ethereum-based stable coin built pro bono by Alt Ctrl — launched days later, also through METABURN, with our team mentoring the youth builders behind it.

CoPlay — Garfield Campus digital twin

2020 – 2024 · Joint venture with owner Susannah Rosenthal · Muncie, Indiana

A joint venture to convert the former Garfield Inc. headquarters into a Science & Technology Park and Family Entertainment Center. Susannah Rosenthal was the owner; I came in as the technical and business-development partner. We spent years in ideation and document preparation, and I engaged the property's IP rights holder on licensing terms — but I did not end up raising the capital, and the deal never closed.

What I built and delivered was the digital twin: a navigable model of the campus — building massing, circulation, landscape treatment and the campus monument — rendered as an explorable environment for stakeholder review.

Unique Magic Studio

2018 – 2020 · uniquemagic.studio

A collaborator-built studio submitted as a group entry to the Magic Leap Independent Creator Program (2018–2020) — spatial-computing and AR-native app concepts, including a Celia Cruz “Forever Celia” AR/VR proposal for the Cuban Diaspora Museum that traces back to a first-place win at the 2017 Miami Maker Faire.

optai.us — ethical AI community

2023 · Founder · optai.us

An initiative around ethical contribution to AI — collecting community input on what should be contributed to a public AI model frontend, and how it should be governed. Ran the intake and contribution process directly.

The Manifestations / Manifestiville

Conceived 10.10.10 · incorporated 2014 – 2020 · President · themanifestations.com

The idea was first birthed on 10 October 2010 — the “10.10.10” the project's own artwork is named for — and it took years of development before it reached the incorporated, operating stage in 2014. Officer of record of a Florida corporation built around a town-scale vision: acquiring and redeveloping a ghost town in Nevada County, California, into a village of guild halls, a land trust, and a membership community. Delivered as a real theme camp at Love Burn Miami in 2017 with mixed-reality experiences and blockchain education, and pursued jointly with KO-STARS on later business development. Designed and operated the supporting web platform — a WordPress multisite network across several sister properties (Rx Soulutions, Soulemnity, Katalyst Club, Vaporwise, Doubted Me, Phrx Institute, Butlerzz, Phathom Us, and others) — alongside forums, a residency program, and membership commerce.

Haptic & sensor experiential R&D

2020 · Creative technologist

Integrated Teslasuit haptic feedback hardware from first software load through experiential prototype. Delivered environment 3D-scanning and sports-performance capture prototypes alongside it.

XR Labs

2019 – 2023 · Miami

Contributed to XR Labs, a Miami WebXR studio — virtual classrooms, auditoriums, and 3D-scanning services for clients including a Wacom sponsorship engagement and a WebXR platform partnership (Ozone Universe) that powered the METABURN build. Authored and held the venture's core legal and partnership documentation.

KO-STARS Agency

2017 – present · Founder

Mixed-reality and metaverse customer engagement for hospitality and retail — sports bars, restaurant chains, and local venues — blending AR and AV layers into physical environments. Ongoing animation and graphics collaboration with Happy Trails Animation since 2015.

Remote Burn — AI ethics panel

25 May 2020 · 3:04:02 · convened and hosted

I convened and hosted a three-hour panel on artificial intelligence, ethics and society during the first pandemic spring. Panelists included a university lecturer then teaching an AI ethics course, joining from Hong Kong, who describes having worked on the machine-translation systems behind Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Translate.

Roughly forty minutes in, a panelist picks up a question I had raised and builds the next segment of the discussion on it:

“So on the concept of ethics that Phoenix brought up in the chat — you know, in our work on ethics in AI and society…”
— transcript, 0:42:50

The conversation covered algorithmic exploitation of cognitive bias, the incentive structures of ad-funded AI, and whether Web 3.0 would reproduce the failures of Web 2.0 — three years before those questions reached the mainstream. Full timestamped transcript available on request.

Current practice, not just experimentation

2020 – present

• Published AI video-generation tooling (March 2023) — authored working ControlNet and Deforum animation configurations for Stable Diffusion on GitHub (github.com/DakaPhoenix): a 140-parameter animation profile and a matched render pipeline with Real-ESRGAN upscaling and frame interpolation
• Self-hosted local inference — GPU-accelerated Ollama, a vision-language model for image understanding, roughly 99 GB of local models on disk
• Generative image and video — custom ComfyUI and Stable Diffusion tooling for concepting, style exploration and visual development
• Systems built — a retrieval and tagging pipeline using local embedding models and a vision-language model for OCR
• Volume production — 64 client and venture concept decks generated on an AI platform, November 2024 – August 2026, across aerospace, fintech, quantum computing, advanced materials and nonprofit sectors
• Convened and hosted a three-hour panel on AI and community in May 2020 — embedded above

The daily toolkit runs on the current frontier, not a year-old snapshot. On the cloud/subscription side: OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-5.6), Google's Gemini 3, and Anthropic's Claude — driven day to day through Claude Code on Sonnet 5, with Opus 5 for heavier agentic and coding work and Fable 5, Anthropic's higher “Mythos-class” model, for the most demanding long-running research — plus Perplexity's Sonar models and Comet browser for grounded, source-cited research, and Cursor for agentic in-editor work.

On the open-weight side, run self-hosted: DeepSeek's V4 (Pro and Flash), Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 (2.8 trillion parameters, open weights), and Nous Research's Hermes 4. The same local-first practice extends to the agent-harness layer — OpenClaw, the open-source personal-agent framework built by PSPDFKit founder Peter Steinberger, and NemoClaw, NVIDIA's security-hardened runtime that wraps OpenClaw (and other open agents, including Hermes) in a sandboxed, local-inference environment built for self-hosted, enterprise-grade deployment.

Hardware: an ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, Radeon 8060S integrated graphics, 124GB unified memory) as a local AI and security research bench, running Ollama for local inference, a self-hosted Immich photo library with ML-based face/object recognition (Docker, Postgres/pgvector, Valkey), and WSL2 running Ubuntu, Kali, and Arch alongside Docker Desktop's own backend. Broader working stack: ComfyUI, Automatic1111/Stable Diffusion WebUI for local generative image/video; Docker, WSL2, Cloudflare Workers/Pages/D1/R2, wrangler CLI for infrastructure; Python (PyTorch, pymupdf, Pillow), Node.js, PowerShell, Git/GitHub for tooling and automation; Adobe Creative Cloud (Premiere, Photoshop, After Effects), DaVinci Resolve for video/image finishing; Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, pandoc for document production; Gamma for AI-assisted deck generation; OBS Studio for capture and streaming; standard security/OSINT tooling from CTF and Black Hat/DEF CON background.

The production pipeline, explained

The system behind the volume-production numbers above

The 60+ decks and document packages referenced throughout this site aren't produced one at a time by hand — they come out of a pipeline I designed, wired, and actively maintain, connecting a set of specialized AI tools end-to-end rather than using any single one in isolation:

• Intake & research — client/venture materials, prior decks, and public source material are ingested and indexed through a local retrieval layer (embedding models + a vision-language model for OCR on scanned documents and photos), so every downstream step has grounded source material to draw from rather than working from a blank prompt.
• Orchestration — Claude Code runs as the coordinating layer: multi-step agent workflows fan work out (research, drafting, image sourcing, formatting) and fan it back in, with MCP tool connections into Gamma (deck generation and export), Google Drive/Gmail (source material retrieval), Cloudflare (deployment), and local image-processing tooling.
• Generation — Gamma handles structured deck generation from briefs; ComfyUI/Stable Diffusion (with Deforum and ControlNet configurations I authored and published) handle custom visual generation when stock or client-supplied imagery isn't sufficient.
• Finishing — a Python/Pillow-based image pipeline (deskew, crop, autocontrast, sharpen, uniform export sizing) brings every visual asset — scanned business cards, event photos, deck slides — to a consistent, presentation-ready quality bar; PDF-level fixes (typo correction, thumbnail generation) run through pymupdf directly against source documents.
• Delivery — finished packages export to PDF and editable Word simultaneously from a single styled-HTML source, and the whole site you're reading is deployed the same way: edited, built, and pushed through the same agentic pipeline, end to end.

The point isn't any one tool — it's the wiring between them: research grounds generation, generation feeds finishing, finishing feeds delivery, with an agent orchestrating the handoffs instead of a human copy-pasting between apps at every step.

JAF Consulting LLC

2018 – 2019 · Fort Lauderdale, FL

My father, Jeff A. Ferguson Sr., signed as exclusive U.S. sales consultant for Nuovi Cantieri Apuania (the Admiral luxury yacht brand), €20–50M sales targets on a 6% commission structure, and separately as exclusive listing broker for a 90-ft Ocean Alexander yacht sale. I served as fractional CTO/CISO supporting his operations through this entity. The family's yacht-industry roots run back further still — to Ferguson Bros. Yacht Construction & Repair and Jeff Ferguson Yacht Sales, Inc.

Phoenix Tech LLC

2022 – present · Boca Raton, FL

AI and technical consulting practice — self-hosted model deployment, generative-video pipeline construction, and computer/security configuration for clients including From the Heart Productions and Happy Trails Animation.

Pacific Domes International

2025 · Operational-partner & investment discussions

Received an unsigned Letter of Intent proposing an operational-partner role and investment position with founder Asha Deliverance. pacificdomes.com

GeoParadise / Wavy Tribe Inc.

2010 – 2012 · Kuna Yala/San Blas, Panama

Sold and outfitted a 92-foot Turkish gulet sailing yacht for the founders, then supported the resulting sailing-yacht logistics operation, alongside the nonprofit eco-cultural arts and music festival they founded. GeoParadise (geoparadise.org) is the nonprofit vehicle behind the Tribal Gathering festival that grew out of that work.

Space Initiatives Inc. — investor introductions & convening

2019 – 2020 · Consultant / investor-relations

Consulted for Space Initiatives Inc. (CEO Charles Radley) on its "Pixie" lunar sensor-network concept, which went on to win a $50,000 USAF AFWERX STTR Phase-1 contract (awarded March 2020). Organized and hosted an April 2019 meeting bringing together Radley, Space Initiatives co-lead Marshall Eubanks, and Michael Laine (President, LiftPort Group — the lunar space-elevator company behind a widely-covered 2012 Kickstarter), then circulated their lunar space-elevator paper and LiftPort's investor materials to my own contact network.

United Space Structures

Aug – Oct 2021 · Advisor (equity-based agreement)

Signed an equity-based Advisor Agreement with founder/CEO Bill Kemp for United Space Structures, a venture building large structures inside lunar and Martian lava tubes. Coordinated an early lunar-lava-tube data-mapping effort using USGS lunar geologic data.

ResQ — AI + AR for first-responder rescue

21 Apr 2019 · Techstars Startup Weekend Los Angeles: AI for Sustainability · Pitch presenter & team driver

Pitched ResQ at a Techstars Startup Weekend hackathon in the LA Arts District: middleware that layers AI and machine learning onto existing first-responder hardware — thermal cameras, robot crawlers, drones, satellite data — to simulate scenarios in real time, generate a probability heat-map of where survivors are most likely trapped, and route it straight into an AR headset HUD in the responder's line of sight. The problem framing: first-responder rescue processes hadn't materially changed since the 1950s (radios and manual building schematics), against roughly 371 natural disasters and 66,000 fatalities a year. Benchmark target: a 20% efficiency gain, worth roughly 12,000 additional lives saved in a first full year.

From the pitch and the mentor Q&A that followed (full transcript):

“Introducing ResQ, a tool that helps firefighters and rescue workers find the holes in greatest need… ResQ uses artificial intelligence to predict where victims are most probably trapped in rubble or in hiding from fire, floods, or other natural disasters.”
— transcript, 1:41–2:03

“The new definition of a billionaire: someone who positively impacts the lives of a billion people. We're really focusing on impact and letting our revenue fall out of impact.”
— transcript, 5:32–5:41

“I've reached out to one of my personal contacts who runs a 15,000-base international company that rescues a few hundred thousand people a year… she would be interested in actually using this in Mozambique right now, because they're having problems identifying survivors…”
— transcript, 8:31–8:48

Team included Lex (AR/Unity development) and Paul Krause, who separately followed up with IBM about a Call for Code submission. Self-reported: I was later offered investment for ResQ following a hackathon and turned it down — personal recollection, not a documented business record.

Techstars Startup Weekends — three cities

2019 · New York, California, Florida

• New York — Techstars Startup Weekend New York: Financial Inclusion, 5–7 Apr 2019, at Rise (43 W 23rd St). Team: Courtney Furlong, Nishil Soni, Ata Tahiroglu, Louis Veyret, Milind Sharma, Chris Chin, Sydney Lai — a fintech / student-loan-refinancing concept.
• California — Techstars Startup Weekend Los Angeles: AI for Sustainability, 19–21 Apr 2019, at Soylent Innovation Lab, LA Arts District. Pitched ResQ, embedded above.
• Florida — a Techstars Startup Weekend in South Florida, where I was a recurring community member of the Fort Lauderdale startup scene (General Provision) through this period.

Persona Capital Labs

2024 – present · Co-Founder & Futurist

Co-founded an AI-agent adaptive crypto-trading fund with a securities attorney, a high-frequency-trading systems architect, and an application architect, targeting a $20M fund.

View investor deck

IO Aircraft — fundraising materials

2019 – 2025

Investor-facing deck produced in support of fundraising and introduction work for IO Aircraft's eVTOL aerospace program, including personal funding, structured equity investment rounds, and repeat investor introductions.

View deck

Satellite communications — advisory & investor introductions

2024 – 2025 · Advisor (company under NDA)

Advised a satellite-communications and telecommunications venture on funding pathways and made introductions to potential investors; company name withheld under NDA.

Advisory network — Inertial Dynamics, ONYX Scientific & Realme

2021 – 2022 · Advisor / NDA-bound collaborator

Signed NDAs and advised across a cluster of early-stage technical ventures introduced through investor-relations contact Denise Ebner: Inertial Dynamics, Incorporated (Virginia; founder Richard Dell, with University of Illinois professor George H. Miley among the technical team) on strategy planning and investor-pitch material; ONYX Scientific, Inc. ("Advanced Systems & Technologies," President Richard von Hack-Prestinary); and Realme / ZenChip Prime (NFT, blockchain and gaming), under a mutual NDA with founder Joseph Hughes.

Edge-native intake and CRM platform

2026 · Architect & builder

Designed and deployed a serverless platform for a nonprofit client: a multi-tier submission pipeline separating public intake, gated review and controlled decryption, with an immutable audit trail. Supporting services for commerce, analytics, transactional mail and isolated preview environments.

• A multi-service edge architecture — distributed compute, databases, and object storage segmented by trust level
• Sealed-at-rest submissions with auditable, least-privilege decryption — a deliberate privacy decision for an organization handling sensitive unreleased material

Ferguson & Associates

Founded 1991 · My own practice since 2007

My father incorporated Ferguson & Associates on my birthday in 1991, intending it as the vehicle through which I would help others with technology. It became my own practice starting in 2007, while working alongside him: systems architecture, network infrastructure, digital-twin content pipelines, VoIP, server and VM administration, and POS/inventory integration for clients across hospitality, maritime and small business.

CryptoCon

25–27 May 2018 · Co-Founder & Funder · San Diego Convention Center

Co-founded and helped fund a three-day cryptocurrency and blockchain conference at the San Diego Convention Center, alongside keynote speaker Paul Krause (founder, Krause Wealth Partners; creator of the Infinance.io blockchain-governance protocol), who introduced me to later contacts as "a partner in cryptocon." The event also featured keynote Timothy Enneking (Managing Partner, Digital Capital Management) and a full speaker roster spanning blockchain law, digital-asset management and Web3 development.

Bespoke Lifestyles International, LLC

2019 – 2020 · Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer (signed, not activated) · Jacksonville Beach, FL

Negotiated and signed a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer agreement with founder/CEO Jim Zahl for a members-only superyacht & private-aviation lifestyle club; the engagement never went into effect, as the company's planned acquisition financing never closed. Retained deal and pitch materials from the engagement, spanning the member-facing concept deck, the SAFEGUARD redemption/non-recourse funding structure, and the underlying business-plan brief.

Adamant Marine — the "RAVE" trimaran & Molecular Quartermasters

2015 – 2018 · Business development

Facilitated and promoted a technology partnership between Molecular Quartermasters (a nano-engineered liquid solar-power coating, applied like paint to a vessel hull) and the historic 114' racing trimaran “RAVE,” under the Adamant Marine banner — drafting press materials and coordinating between the technology's inventor and the vessel's owner.

ReMine ME

2025 · Founder (R&D)

Developed a full business plan, financial model, and investor pitch deck for a Flash Joule Heating waste-and-soil resource-recovery venture — technology assessment, market sizing, equipment/personnel costing, and IRR analysis across four funding scenarios. Full slide gallery under Studio work above; enhanced pitch summary below.

AromaDisperse

2025 – present · Concept & technical development

An aromatherapy hardware, software, and franchise-SaaS concept — project stage, no company formed.

Noo — a modular wearables and interface product family

2020 – 2025 · Originator · Concept development, specification & investor packaging

Noo is my own product-naming framework for a family of modular, sensor-instrumented wearables and the software layer that binds them. I originated the line, wrote its specifications, sourced its components and partners, and took it to investors. NooPhones were a prototype evolution of the IRIS Flow headphones (see Don Estes / The Portacle above, IRIS Flow sold 1,200+ units) — a next-generation direction built on that same sensory-resonance foundation, not yet manufactured at scale.

• NooSuit — haptic-feedback bodysuit
• NooHelmet — instrumented protective helmet, scoped across sports, medical, military, private, commercial, government and industrial use, with construction work as the first target application
• NooPhones — headphones combining 50mm beryllium and electrostatic drivers with forehead EEG electrodes, a vagus-nerve neck contact, and real-time audio reconstruction
• NooVisor / NooHud — heads-up display hardware, and a marketplace for HUD content
• NooVue — leasable remote HUD views with bidirectional multisensory feedback
• NooEars, NooBands, NooMods — modular ear cups, body-position bands (head, neck, wrist, elbow, knee, ankle, lower back) and snap-on controllers
• NooGnosys — the software layer

Don Estes (InnerSense Inc., VibraSound, The Portacle) and Randall “Randy” Stack (Psiometrics, UK) advised the work — I credit both as mentors in my own product brief.

Teslasuit and Psiometrics — haptic feedback procurement, 2020: I was the buyer-side principal, jointly with Randy Stack of Psiometrics, on a Teslasuit developer-kit procurement from VR Electronics Ltd in London. In November 2020 I wrote directly to Teslasuit's customer-experience and partnerships leads requesting a medium developer kit addressed to Stack and myself, asked that the account move to a direct line between our partnership and Teslasuit, and insisted the introducing representative's sales commission be honoured. Teslasuit's Strategic Partnerships Director opened the purchase order under the subject line “Teslasuit and Psiometrics.” The introduction had come through Ramzi Faris of Indu5try at Burning Man.

Psiometrics signal processing in NooPhones: the NooPhones specification is designed around U.S. Patent 8,788,557, “Bi-phasic applications of real and imaginary separation, and reintegration in the time domain,” invented by Don Wayne Estes and Randall Joseph Stack. My brief describes the resulting feature as a sensory-enhancement engine that restores the harmonic partials lost when compression separates the sine and cosine components of a signal — I specified the product around that technology; I am not an inventor on the patent.

ILL Threads — illuminated threads

2024 · Originator · Business brief & pitch deck · Pre-seed concept

My venture concept for coating conductive thread in transparent, flexible, washable plant-derived polymer, so that light can be sewn or embroidered into any textile surface. I wrote the business brief and built the pitch deck.

Phased product lines run from off-the-shelf illuminated thread, illuminated leather strip and UV-protected industrial thread, through embroidered apparel, awnings and canopies, decorative patches, and high-visibility safety vests and workwear. The brief is direct about the intellectual-property position: coating formulations are described as patent-pending and not issued, and it argues the business stands on its own as a manufacturer and retailer of a custom solution regardless of patent ownership. Adjacent research tracks named in the appendices — printed-electronics conductive inks, integrated sEMG/EKG/EEG biosensors, and haptic feedback layers — are the same sensing stack as the Noo wearables above.

Microsoft — Xbox / MMORPG Live Operations

c. 2002 – 2004 · Contract, via Volt Information Sciences · Redmond, WA

First professional technology role: placed at Microsoft on Xbox-related work through IT staffing firm Volt, administering massively-multiplayer online games and going on to work on Asheron's Call. Also held a VMC Consulting ID badge from the same Redmond corridor during this period.

OptimERA, Inc. — now OptimERA Holdings, Inc. ("OptimERA WiFi" / "OptimERA xG")

2005 – 2006 · Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Head of R&D · Unalaska/Dutch Harbor & Akutan, Alaska

The path there started on fishing boats out of Dutch Harbor, Akutan and Kodiak — a month on deck was enough to know there was a better way to make a living. I wired the docks myself and built a small internet café, which grew into OptimERA, a wireless ISP I co-founded with Emmett Fitch, still the company's President today. I authored the original business plan, built the company's early technical and web infrastructure, and ran R&D.

The original October 2005 business plan — retained since — lists me on staff as Research & Development alongside Emmett Fitch (CEO) and Brett Buffone (General Manager), with the R&D position carrying formal 10% decision-making authority alongside the CEO and Controller. The plan's own primary business model was cellular phone service, not just internet: a goal of 600 cellular customers by mid-2006 against named competitors Alaska Wireless and Bristol Bay Cellular, plus a dedicated $50,000 "Boat Bandwidth" milestone for 2007. View the original business plan.

The company's own published history independently confirms the Akutan chapter I was part of: a Wi-Fi installation at the Trident Seafoods Akutan processing facility (winter 2006) and a VoWiFi platform serving the town with prepaid wireless calling alongside data. Company history · Project list. Twenty years on, the company — now OptimERA Holdings, Inc. — has gone on to build its own LTE cellular network (2019) and become Starlink's first Community Gateway partner (2024).

Live event & camp leadership

Black Rock City 2007–2015, 2025 · dozens of regional burns

Directed a 135-person Love Burn camp, with a core team of 35 active volunteers, across logistics, build and on-site delivery. Camps and projects: Destiny Lounge (2009), Root Society, Chakralicious, Camp Questionmark, and others. Managed the technological back end for a camp's Remote Burn programming — event lineup and the supporting technology stack. Broader regional circuit: Black Rock City, Love Burn, Symbiosis Gathering, and a run of themed camps — Lemon Camp, Bitcoin & Blockchain Camp, Phoenix Camp among them.

Satellite-connected interactive robot installation

Black Rock City · with Michelle, Hats Walk

Brought an interactive robotic art installation out to Burning Man, connected via satellite internet — the first satellite-connected robot installation of its kind to interact directly with participants. Built with Michelle of Hats Walk.

Hats Walk — promoter & activation producer

2018 · Official Promoter · Comic-Con activation & yacht party

Official promoter for Hats Walk (hatswalk.org), the fashion-show and art installation, and helped assemble its pitch and planning decks; produced the accompanying Comic-Con activation and yacht party directly. Explored bringing on Melt Creative (Morgan Lavery, Ralph Pastor, Evan Glantz — the projection-mapping studio later folded into MELT EVERYTHING) for further collaboration and requested quotes, evaluating their prior case-study work alongside a combined KO-STARS/Melt Comic-Con concept deck, though that engagement was never ultimately contracted.

eXperience — THE GAME

Collaborator · with Jai Hudes & Shanti · eXperience Technologies, Inc.

Collaborated with Jai Hudes and Shanti on eXperience — THE GAME, a card-based experiential game (Lifecircle, Relate, and Challenge card mechanics) designed to foster communication and self-discovery, produced under eXperience Technologies, Inc.

Tribal Convergence & Paititi Institute

Ongoing

Elected male leader of the Wild Card Tribe within the Tribal Convergence network (tribalconvergence.com) — the elected designation, not a self-description. Tribal Convergence is a grassroots, Indigenous-connection-focused community network organized around "holographic governance": collaborative, non-hierarchical leadership across two parallel structures — functional Guild Groups (Spirituality, Councilship, Arts, Media & Communications, Wellness, Village Infrastructure, Learning, Conscious Enterprise, Relations, Guardianship, Science, Earth Stewardship, Intentional Gatherings, Land-Based Community) and geographic Regional Tribes (BC, Salish Sea, Portlandia, Jefferson State, Bay Area/NorCal, High Sierra, Santa Barbara, Ojai, LA, San Diego, Denver/Boulder, Texas, Hawaii, Nomad, and Wild Cards — the catch-all tribe for Ambassadors from regions outside the mapped geography, which is the tribe I lead). The network's Core Admin Council is currently Aokha (Betsy Cacchione), Jamaica "Jai Ma" Stevens, and Raquel Hugo.

Over a decade of engagement with the Paititi Institute (paititi-institute.org) community — continuous correspondence running from 2014 to today — which works with Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon and Andes on biodiversity protection, cultural-heritage preservation, and community-led education and healthcare through immersive retreats and living-wisdom courses. That same community lineage is documented in the film The Sacred Science: eight people with serious health conditions spend a month in the Peruvian Amazon working with Indigenous medicine and traditional plant medicine.

Security & government

Ongoing

Competed on a three-person team in the OSINT/HUMINT/SIGINT Capture the Flag track at DEF CON 26 (2018) and placed — event year confirmed by the retained iCTF challenge coin. Attended Black Hat USA 2018 (Las Vegas) for professional development in security and threat research. Active individual registrant on SAM.gov, pursuing federal government-contracting opportunities. Hands-on R&D with brain–computer-interface hardware, exploring neurotech integration for interactive applications.

DreamTank — mentor & metaverse builder

January 2020 – November 2021

Mentored young people building browser-based virtual worlds in A-Frame and Mozilla Hubs for a Sustainable Development Goals experience presented at Burning Man. One mentee's world drew roughly 15 live visitors; his mother then escorted him from it through The Bridge Experience and into METABURN via the web portal — hopping between worlds exactly as the platform and site were built to allow. Shared with the family's consent.

Don Estes — The Portacle & the science of vibration

2017 – 2023 · Mentee & production collaborator

Mentored by Don Estes — founder of InnerSense, Inc. and author of Harmonic Law: The Science of Vibration — on Sensory Resonance and The Portacle (theportacle.com), his VibraSound® sensory-resonance technology, independently valued at over $1M in a 2019 marketplace appraisal. Collaborated directly on Burning Man visual-art production, including a "Wise Rise" cymagraph video project with the Skytones team, and coordinated technical installations of the Portacle's Neuro and IRIS Flow headphone components — IRIS Flow shipped and sold 1,200+ units — alongside Randall (Randy) Stack — a mathematician and principal of Psiometrics (UK) who worked with Don Estes on the Portacle's Neuro system, connected me with the IRIS Flow team, and collaborated on Teslasuit/NooSuit haptic-feedback R&D. Randy Stack was a close mentor and collaborator for several years. A friendship with Burning Man artist and composer Gary Stadler (d. 2025), spanning a decade of correspondence, belongs in this same community lineage.

Sound & frequency production — Burning Man Temple project

2020 – 2021 · Convener

Convened a sound-and-visual collaboration for a Burning Man Temple metaverse build, bringing together Donald Adams (Sound of Stars, soundofstars.org — chakra-frequency audio production) and Dylan Field & Margarethe Steffens (Skytones) to pair chakra-frequency audio with 2D/3D mudra visuals. Separately, brought Robin Arnott's SoundSelf — an award-winning voice- and breath-driven immersive audio experience (soundself.com) — into METABURN as Camp SoundSelf.