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.”

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 · 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

2020 – 2024 · Co-owner, with Susannah Rosenthal · Muncie, Indiana

A venture to convert the former Garfield Inc. headquarters into a Science & Technology Park and Family Entertainment Center, co-owned with Susannah Rosenthal. Delivered a navigable digital twin of the campus — building massing, circulation, landscape treatment and the campus monument rendered as an explorable environment for stakeholder review — alongside direct engagement with the property's IP rights holder on licensing terms.

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

2014 – 2020 · President · themanifestations.com

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 — 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 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

JAF Consulting LLC

2018 – 2019 · Fort Lauderdale, FL

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; separately, exclusive listing broker for a 90-ft Ocean Alexander yacht sale.

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 · Founder-track operational partner & investor

Signed a Letter of Intent for an operational-partner role and investment position with founder Asha Deliverance.

GeoParadise / Wavy Tribe Inc.

2010 – 2012 · Kuna Yala/San Blas, Panama

Founded a nonprofit eco-cultural arts and music festival, run in parallel with a sailing-yacht logistics operation.

Space Initiatives Inc. — investor introductions

2020

Connected private investors to a company holding an active USAF AFRL/AFWERX STTR Phase-1 contract for a lunar sensor-network concept.

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.

View deck

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. I operate the practice in earnest since returning to the US in 2007: 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

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

Co-founded and helped fund a cryptocurrency conference at the San Diego Convention Center.

Bespoke Lifestyle International

Dec 2020 · Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer & interim Director of Technology

Hired as CAIO and interim Director of Technology for a members-only superyacht lifestyle club venture.

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.

AromaDisperse

2025 – present · Founder & CEO

An aromatherapy hardware, software, and token-economy venture, with an associated token layer under Fibonacci Chain LLC.

OptimERA, Inc.

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

Co-founded and led technical architecture for a wireless ISP serving Unalaska/Dutch Harbor, Alaska — authored the original business plan, built the company's early technical and web infrastructure, and ran R&D. The company still operates more than twenty years later, now partnered with SES Networks and Starlink.

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

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.

Security & government

Ongoing

Competed on a three-person team in the OSINT/HUMINT/SIGINT Capture the Flag track at DEF CON 2017 & 2018, placing both years. 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 Emotiv EEG 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.