Spencer Kiser

Technology Leader with over 20 Years Driving Transformation, Accessibility, and Team Growth in Cultural Institutions

Posts by Collection

portfolio

Sonictroller

Sonictroller is an interface that allows the user to control video games with acoustic musical instruments.

Fermata

Auditory calendar for the visually impaired.

Forest Hills Sound Map

Forest Hills Sound Map is a sound map consisting of field recordings made in 2005 in my former neighborhood, Forest Hills.

spinCycle

spinCycle is a synesthetic turntable that allows you to arrange and play colors visually and musically.

Sonic Body Pong

Sonic Body Pong is based on Atari’s classic video game Pong, and takes place in real space, with the players using their bodies as paddles. The ball is experienced by the players purely through spatialized sound piped to the players via headphones.

MoMA Mobile

The first version of the MoMA mobile platform.

BakerTweet gallery display

A scrolling marquee in the gallery, driven by the RSS feed from a BakerTweet device installed in MoMA’s Cafe 2, for the exhibition Talk to Me.

Random Poem Player

Custom telephony application and web audio player to support artwork “Dial-A-Poem”, by John Giorno, in the exhibition, Ecstatic Alphabets at the Museum of Modern Art.

Windows on Art

Windows in the gallery, each with a door over it. Opening a door reveals a high-resolution screen showing works from the collection, and advances to the next. Built on Raspberry Pis for Century of the Child.

MoMA Studio: Common Senses Sound Map

A sound map for exploring field recordings made around the world as part of a multisensory environment called Common Senses in conjunction with the exhibition Century of the Child.

Mermaid <-> Manatee app

Software for the Mermaid / Manatee installation in the Mythic Creatures exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.

Tetris interface

A button interface for the arcade game Tetris, in the Applied Design Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Photo-taking Necklace

Visitors to Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time exhibition at MoMA and PS1 wear cell phone necklaces that record their experience. Selected images are displayed as background on MoMA’s Take Your Time exhibition subsite.​

Share Your Silence

A sound map of silence, made for the MoMA exhibition There Will Never Be Silence: Scoring John Cage’s 4’33”. Participants recorded the “silence” around them, said where they were standing, and selected recordings were added to the map.

Artwork of the Day

A prototype that returns a different Met artwork each day, chosen from open data about your location, the weather, and the day’s news. Built at The Met x Microsoft x MIT hackathon.

publications

Sonictroller

Published in New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME05), 2005

Recommended citation: Hindman, David and Spencer Kiser. "Sonictroller." Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME05). Vancouver, BC, Canada. pp. 254–255.
Download Paper

Mapping User Feedback on the Met App

Published in Digital Underground, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015

Recommended citation: Filardi, Liz and Spencer Kiser. "Mapping User Feedback on the Met App." Digital Underground, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. July 22, 2015.

talks

(Geo) Phone Tag

Shown at the ETel Fair, an informal evening event introducing garage inventors and their below-the-radar creations to a larger audience. Exhibited alongside Dee Harvey and Jenny Chowdhury of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

spinCycle

Poster demo of spinCycle, a synesthetic turntable that lets you arrange and play colours visually and musically. A camera takes the place of the tonearm: rather than a needle playing grooves in a record, spinCycle generates sound from the colours it sees as the DJ arranges brightly coloured plexiglass discs on the spinning platter, rearranging them on the fly to build a new soundtrack.

MoMA App 2.0

Presented with Shannon Darrough. In July 2013 MoMA launched a rebuilt version of the MoMA App, created to replace the handheld audio wands distributed in the museum. The talk covered the app’s features and design, an overview of the new system’s architecture, the design collaboration with MoMA’s Education department, and the agile process the development team ran with partners at Pivotal Labs.

MoMA Studio Sound Map

Presented with Laura Beiles. In the summer of 2012 we built an online sound map and asked the public to contribute field recordings from their lives, as the sound component of the MoMA Studio: Common Senses space held in conjunction with the Century of the Child exhibition. The map grew to over a hundred recordings - wind turbines in Andalucía and Ireland, chanting from Japan, a manifestation in Madrid, streets in London, a soundwalk through the Museum itself.

Building a Map for the Met App

Way-finding is a common challenge for museums, often thought to require significant time and resources to solve. The Met’s complex floor plan made developing a useful mobile map for the Met App particularly challenging, especially given our small team and tight timeline. Rather than building an elaborate solution based on assumptions, we quickly developed an MVP that worked on both native platforms. Using a build-measure-learn feedback loop, we iteratively improved the Map based on visitor feedback, enhancing the overall visitor experience.

App Crit

Served as a peer reviewer on a panel critiquing recent museum apps - iOS and Android, touch tables, kiosks and bespoke hardware, as distinct from websites. Chaired by Stephanie Pau, alongside Ty Pierce, Laura Mann, and Shannon Darrough.

Artwork Collection Data at The Met

Addresses the history of the Met’s collection in digital form and what makes it unique. Explores the quirks in the data, the categorization challenges, and proposes use cases for machine learning.

teaching

Soundwalk Studio: Making Environmental Sound Art

Workshop, Museum of Modern Art, 2008

By focusing on the soundscape in which we are immersed, we can find new appreciation of our surroundings, as well as discover a pallette of material from which to create art. The soundwalk is an excellent method for exploring a space and collecting material for sound-based works. Students will learn audio fundamentals and recording and editing techniques, and will participate in listening and field recording exercises. We will also create a digital sound map using the recordings from our field trips.

Communications Lab

Masters course, Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, 2008

An introductory course designed to provide students with hands-on experience using various technologies (online communities, digital imaging, audio, video, animation, authoring environments and the World Wide Web.) The forms and uses of new communications technologies are explored in a laboratory context of experimentation and discussion. The technologies are examined as tools that can be employed in a variety of situations and experiences. Principles of interpersonal communications, media theory, and human factors are introduced. Weekly assignments, team and independent projects, and project reports are required.