J. Ferguson Phoenix
Creative Technologist · Interactive & Immersive Experience Director
Twenty-five years in technology, nineteen running an independent practice. I concept, prototype, and ship interactive and immersive work that connects physical places to digital layers — and I stay in the tools.
Work archive — video
Documentation of the projects below, published from my own channel.
Provenance. All videos below are hosted on my YouTube channel J-Phoenix (@J1Ph1), channel ID UCHqzjs7hhRj4JLf4hTD6NTw. Most are unlisted and are surfaced here deliberately for review — unlisted videos are not discoverable or embeddable by anyone other than the account holder, so their presence on this page is itself evidence of ownership.
Recording dates run 2011–2023 and are visible on each video. Happy to walk through any of them live, or share the Studio dashboard on request.
Selected work
METABURN — The Bridge Experience
2020 · Founder & Creative Director
A free, all-ages, fully immersive 3D web-based XR Burn that ran in any browser on any device — no download, no headset required — selected by Burning Man Project as one of the officially Recognized Universes of the 2020 Multiverse, alongside BRCvr, BURN2 and SparkleVerse.
- 11,500 participants joined over the event window, 30 August – 6 September 2020
- 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 — multidirectional world-hopping between the site and connected universes
- 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.”
- The pandemic era that pushed Burning Man online is the subject of HBO's four-part documentary series The Man Will Burn (2026)
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; the team designed and built more than was ultimately deployed.
Interactive & Augmented NFT Art Mural
2021 · Art Basel · Creative technologist
An augmented and projection-mapped digital layer over a physical art mural, produced with the 2021 Art Basel collective — animated overlays, generative pattern work, and an on-chain component tied to the physical piece.
CoPlay — Garfield Campus digital twin
2021 – 2023 · Muncie, Indiana
A navigable digital twin of the Jim Davis “Garfield” Campus in Muncie, Indiana — building massing, circulation, landscape treatment and the campus monument rendered as an explorable environment for stakeholder review, produced as part of the CoPlay venture with Susannah Rosenthal.
Unique Magic Studio
2016 – 2020 · Founder · uniquemagic.studio
A spatial-computing and immersive content studio. Built and led a distributed creative team, and mentored multiple independent creators through applications to the Magic Leap Independent Creator Program — developing project entries, experience concepts, and team practice for AR-native work.
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
2014 – 2019 · themanifestations.com
A year-round festival village infrastructure project in California, and the membership platform that ran it. Designed and operated a community system with guild halls across art and culture, earth stewardship, science and technology, learning and village infrastructure — plus forums, a wiki, a residency program, paid membership tiers and 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.
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.
AI in the creative process
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 experimentation
2020 – present
- Published AI video-generation tooling (March 2023) — authored working ControlNet and Deforum animation configurations for Stable Diffusion on GitHub: 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
Platform & infrastructure
Edge-native intake and CRM platform
2026 · Architect & builder
Designed and deployed a serverless platform for a nonprofit film fiscal sponsor: a three-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.
- 17 edge Workers, 9 databases, object storage split by trust level
- Sealed-at-rest submissions with auditable, least-privilege decryption — a deliberate privacy decision for an organization handling filmmakers' unreleased work
Ferguson & Associates
2007 – present · Founder
Independent technology consultancy — 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.
Client work — by sector
Client engagements are under confidentiality. Described by sector and deliverable only, never by name.
Strategy, concept and pitch material across eleven sectors
2024 – 2026 · ongoing
Sixty-plus client decks and document packages produced as an independent practice, using an AI-assisted pipeline I built and maintain. Representative sectors:
- Senior living & adaptive reuse — intergenerational campus initiative; partner, funder and advisory packages
- Independent film & television — fiscal-sponsorship positioning and pitch-training curriculum
- Nonprofit formation & governance — a complete entity package: exemption narrative, sponsorship agreements, consulting MSA and SOW templates, conflict-of-interest and financial policy, jurisdiction analysis
- Advanced materials & cleantech — materials-recovery and thermal-processing investment models
- Aerospace — rotorcraft configuration and build documentation
- Smart textiles & wearables — two product platforms
- Protective equipment & safety
- RF detection & secure communications — including a secure meeting architecture
- Botanical & cultural institutions
- Healthcare experience
- Developer services & CRM platform — including my own platform design
Community & teaching
Live event & camp leadership
Directed live event production and camp operations, leading teams of up to 35 people across logistics, build and on-site delivery.
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.