Software

As a software developer, Reuben’s experience began when learning how to write code in various research science environments before working as a full-stack engineer and engineering manager at New York Magazine. The bulk of his tenure there was devoted to the development of The Strategist, with responsibilities spanning from implementing the full site redesign, and developing tools and services that power editorial, data, and business-development workflows in addition to the primary reader-experience across a number of distribution platforms (e.g. web, AMP, and Apple News).

He has also built out a number of creative coding projects. He developed custom software for the Hobo UFO project with artist James Hoff, which programmatically détourns Google Maps Street View into an audio-reactive cinematography reminiscent of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale.

Sound

Reuben is currently working on a project titled Airports for Music. This is a loose collection of new and ongoing work exploring the grey area between location recordings, synthetic sound, and the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air. These pieces begin with listening-through-recording, in which I sit with a portable recording device for 5-10 minutes in a location that seems well suited to a kind of silence, and I try to listen to everything that I imagine the microphone can hear. At a later point, I return to each of these recordings and compose a piece around them, but leaving each original location recording largely unedited. These pieces exist almost as fragrance, passing clouds of colouration suspended in air.

During a previous studio residency at EMS in Stockholm, he began developing the Weaving Music web application. In this project, he explores the notion of composition as the deployment of strategies for dealing with the propositional materiality of sound. Drawing from the origins of computing within the history of textile production, his forthcoming work attempts to formalize this idea of sonic materiality by abstracting principles of weaving and textile design into a generative framework for electronic music production.

Selected Performances

Selected Discography and Publications

Ceramics

Reuben’s most recent ceramics work was completed during a summer workshop at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, where he protyped and experimented with 3D ceramic printing techniques and bots. You can read reflections on that workshop here, see an image gallery of selected works here, and check out ceramics for sale on Etsy.

mug in shape of a dwelling
From a series of "casa mugs", produced with a kurinuki carving technique, in which the vessel and door-like handle is carved out, and the surface is left jagged and rough, largely untouched by any surface intervention.