j h h l . n e t: who 
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Who is Henry Lowengard?
And what the heck does J.H.H.L. stand for?
My name is John Henry Hartman Lowengard. Although I've occasionally been called J. Henry, I generally hang up on people who call me John.
Born: August 30, 1956, 1PM
Hartford, Connecticut.
A nice, large format photograph of me, taken in April 2004 by Steven Salmieri. (16K, 72dpi)
A nice, large format photograph of me, taken in April 2004 by Steven Salmieri. (1.3M, 300dpi)
- Note: (if your browser supports style sheets)
Links in boxes like this jump to pages in jhhl.net.
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- Art shows and other artistic pursuits
- 2018 ▶
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- March: Equinox: A Cocoon Theatre Soirée performance with Henry Lowengard and Craig Chin. 1 hour of drones "Cloud music for longer days"
- April: Welcome To My Parlor: A Cocoon Theatre Soirée performance with Henry Lowengard and Brian Dewan. Cautionary and tragic songs, stories, and poems.
- 2015 ▶
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- March: Parlory Parlor: A Cocoon Theatre Soirée performance with Henry Lowengard and Brain Dewan. Period songs and poetry, perfromed on autoharp and accordion, in the historic parlor of the Cunneen-Hackett Arts Center, Poughkeepsie, NY. Special guest: Nancy O. Graham, and Jillian Sutton on Victrola.
- 2014 ▶
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- June: 1974 Alumni show at Loomis Chaffee's Mercy Gallery. Prints, Postcard pieces, video from 1974.
- 2013 ▶
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- 2010 ▶
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- March: Powers Of One
A response / tribure to POWERS OF TEN by Charles and Ray Eames. For a challenge by Core 77.
- 2008 ▶
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- 2006 ▶
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- January and February: Kingston Library, display case prints and computer installation: Selections of prints, panels of frames including "9 Bottles of Beer", "Red Maple Leaves", "Exquisite", frame array prints ("ingrids"), and a computer showing many of the Daily Vapor videos available here and other very short animations.
- 2005 ▶
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- December: Kingston Library: Roof Repair and Replacement, a short-short video about the improvements to the Library's infrastructure, which took place in October - November 2005.
See Kingston Library: Roof Repair and Replacement (1'51'', 1.1M).
See Kingston Library: Roof Repair and Replacement [bigger] (1'51'', 3.1M).
See Kingston Library: Roof Repair and Replacement [even bigger] (1'51'', 9.3M).
- November: Light Excercise, Listen With Your Eyes Workshop, Nov. 12, 2005. Uses time lapse, filters, slow pans, and out of focus images.
See Light Excercise (3'14'', 3.6M).
- November: Autumn Frames, prints from the October "leaf" Daily Vapor animations.
At the Espous Library, Port Ewen , NY.
- October 2, 2005: In My Rowboat: New Somniloquies
with Nancy Graham for the 10th annual Dream Festival at Deep Listening Space Detailed information and media are here!
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Stuck In My Head, an audio exhibit at the Jersey City Museum in Jersey City, NJ.
Henry Lowengard: Stuck in Your Head
September 15, 2005 - January 27, 2006
Belief Boy of Music, (Dec 15, 1988)
The artist drew on an interview from WNYC's New Sounds program, between host, John Schaefer and guest, downtown composer Glenn Branca. Just prior to this interview, John Cage made an infamous remark about Branca's Indeterminate Activity of Resultant Masses at the 1982 New Music America:
"My feelings were disturbed ... I found in myself a willingness to connect the music with evil and with power. I don't want such a power in my life. If it was something political it would resemble fascism" (John Cage, 1982).
Cage later changed his mind about Branca's music - but the old quotation is the one that sticks. Branca's natural nervousness and laughter and the contrast between the two voices were exceptionally appropriate for Sound Bite. Belief Boy of Music is in four movements, each using different parameters for sound generation.
Other works are:
- Read My Lips, (1992), a hasty promise of the 1992 presidential election analyzed on NPR, and by Sound Bite;
- Call Ya Later (Dec 12, 1994), up to five one-way conversations fit into a single UHF audio channel - an interesting cross talk portrait of New York City in the days of analog mobile phones;
- Ada Rowboat (Aug 23, 2005), a new piece based on the latest somniloquy of Nancy Graham, the artist's then wife;
- St. Peter's Tour (1994?), an old tour cassette takes the listener on a dizzying trip around St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome;
- Day of the Dead (excerpt), (Oct 28, 1989), a combination of several techniques and programs written into an audio collage for the Day of the Dead, 1989.
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- Love Is So Sweet, a Valentine's Day animation.
- The Daily Vapor, a new image created daily.
- 2004 ▶
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- October 20, 2004: Delicious Evening
An evening of music, readings and animation by Henry Lowengard and Nancy Graham at Deep Listening Space in Kingston NY.
Detailed information and media are here!
- September 24, 2004: Listen with Your Eyes Workshop
Nancy Graham and I participated in the Listen With Your Eyes workshop on experimental video and devotional cinema. Here is the short video I made from that workshop, Seeing (2'55'', 13M).
- 2002 ▶
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- Animations for POLLOCK SQUARED
the experimental ultra-indie art biography/fantasy Pollock Squared, by Bill Rabinovitch features a few of my rather small animations.

- 1997-1999 ▶
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- Exhibitions at ECHO Headquarters
The Art Conference of ECHO, the venerable NYC online community, sponsored group shows when there was a place to hang them.
I showed works in:
- December 1997: PERCOLATING INSIDE & OFFLINE
Showing the same triptych as was shown at Dong-Ah Gallery.
- May 1998: THE SELF-PORTRAIT SHOW
showing this:

(actually something more sophisticated than that),
and a comic done with my wife, Nancy Graham.
- October 1998: ABSTRACT ECHOIDS
Showing an hour long mix of my video work.
- May 1999: SPRING FEVER
Showing a doll I made with my then 2-year old son Raymond.
- October 1999: CURVES
Showing some ancient vertice-local warped curve pictures from the 70's that I made.
- 1996 ▶
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- ISEA'96 Rotterdam, The Netherlands
presented a poster session with Nik Williams: CYBERGOMI: Here Today Gone Tomorrow Featuring a Vapor Paint video and a live demo.
Here's the Program
- 1995 ▶
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- October 1995:
TELECOM '95 (Geneva) VRML spaces for France Telecom
- Summer 1995:
Dong-Ah Gallery, Seoul Korea Vapor Paint Triptych - 23x23 inch IRIS prints: one Vapor Paint (2-d) scene and two Inventor (3-D) scenes derived from the same data.
- 1994 ▶
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- Article in "Experimental Musical Instruments" newsletter: vol 9 #6, on "Software-o-phones," my computer based software instruments. and sound examples on the compilation tape for Volume 9.
[available at http://www.echonyc.com/softphones.html]
- January 31:
Presentation/performance of sound and animation at Staedtische Galerie im Buntentor, Bremen Germany
- October 24:
Presentation at Trinity College, Hartford CT.
- Animations for WFMU-TV, another public access show.
- 1993 ▶
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- April:
New York Tension, group show at Gallery 450 showing "SOLD", a computer poem using FRAX.
- September:
Release of CD "Transforms:the Nerve Events Project" on Cuneiform Records with "Sublime Message".
- Spring and summer:
created animations for an interactive computer piece running at the Taejon Expo in Taejon,Korea.
- 1992 ▶
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- Typical Vapor Paint movie at this point:

click to show (Quicktime movie)
- 1991 ▶
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- October:
Animation for ECO-WARRIOR, a one woman show at the Society for Illustrators by Sandra Filippucci.
- October:
Animation TUNA WIGGLE, based on the paintings of Bill Rabinovitch, is produced over a period of about six weeks. It was shown fairly often on Bill's cable TV show ART SEEN.
Back in 1991, it took two days to render the 1100 images, to be shown at 10 fps, and they were at a special half video resolution. Now, it takes 20 minutes and 40 seconds to render the 3432 images, to be shown at 30 fps, at full video resolution.
- Tuna Wiggle Quicktime movies: (1 Minute, 55 seconds)
- A selection of images from Tuna Wiggle.
- 1987 ▶
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- November:
For the first show at Mission Graphics Support in the East Village, NYC, of a new kind of art by Sandra Filippucci, I coined the term DIGITAL MONOTYPE. Art historians, take note!
Here's the program:
MGS page-1
MGS page-2
MGS page-3
- 1980 ▶
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- June:
Barnes Gallery, Loomis-Chaffee School:
One man show of altered Polaroid SX-70 pictures and Postcards.

Altered SX70 over Postcard
(this is a color Xerox of the original...)
- April:
staged reading of my play "Touch Typing"
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- Performances and Radio
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- 2022 ▶
- 2021 ▶
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- 2018 ▶
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- 2017 ▶
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- 2009 ▶
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- June, 2009
Joined the acoustic music group Mamalama on Hammered Dulcimer, Pianica, Glockenspiel, Recorders, etc. Mamalama has released three recordings, "Willows and Waves" (2010), "The World of Color and Light" (2012), and "Live at the Old Dutch Church" (2016)
- 2008 ▶
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- May 4, 2008
Player with the American Festival of Microtonal Music's ODYSSEUS,
Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Boston MA. this was a reprise of the 1997 performance!
- 1997 ▶
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- 1997
Player with the American Festival of Microtonal Music's ODYSSEUS,
St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia U, NYC, NY.
- 1996 ▶
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- June 12 and October 24-26,1996
Player with First Avenue's performance piece A CRITICAL MASS
Washington Square Church
- February 2, 1996
WFMU-WKCR radio war participant - "A radio simulcast war fought with cartoon sound bites."
- 1994 ▶
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- January 31:
Presentation/performance of sound and animation at Staedtische Galerie im Buntentor, Bremen Germany
- April 18:
Radio Program WBAI-FM: Singing Science Records show
- December 11:
Radio Program WBAI-FM: Found Sounds
- I start singing with the Loser's Lounge
Eventual repertoire:
- Brian Wilson, "Still I Dream of It"
- Bert Bacharach, "San Jose"
- Harry Nilsson, "There Will Never Be"
- A. C. Jobim, "Aguas de Março", with Nancy Graham
- Lee Hazelwood, "Poet, Fool or Bum"
- 1993 ▶
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- January and October:
WBAI-FM radio, "Oblique Strategies", processing live listener phone calls with HARM.
- August:
co-wrote and acted in "A Tragic Occurance," video play as Egon Schiele. Manhattan Public Access Cable TV.
- October:
"Naked and Not Ashamed," solo series at performance space bOb, played various computer instruments and processed poetry and television audio. Curated by David First.
- Lots of times:
"Empty Orchestra Café," Perry Hoberman's crazy artistic version of a karaoke bar. I made about six karaoke videos for this project, and sang a lot of the others. The most notorious of them was "Madonna Mopey Lay," a mangled English "translation" of "La Donna è Mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto.
- 1992 ▶
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- October:
featured on radio WKCR-FM, "Transfigured Night"
- 1990 ▶
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- December:
Cyberspace party: Sound and Fury animation and sound effects
- 1989 ▶
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- October:
Sound and Fury Club Day of the Dead mutimedia computer jam.
- February:
American Festival of Microtonal Music at Yamaha Showroom: Tape piece "Nov 13, 1987" and tape realization of Josip Slavenski's "Music for Natur-tone System"
- November:
American Expressionism Panel: simulated Mark Kostabi via interactive computer animation. With Vincent Bilotta.
- 1988 ▶
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- May:
American Festival of Microtonal Music, realized a version of Tenney's "For Ann(rising)" in software.
- 1985 ▶
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- April:
American Festival of Microtonal Music at Roulette
Premiere: Just Autoharp Improvisations
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- Music Discography ▶
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Hear my work as The Jazz Kissingers, and other music and some other other pieces.
- 2021: Don't Miss the Party Girls Contest - I separated the audio out for the dialog that was used in dozens of remixes , Ken Freedman's radio show on WFMU. I did two of them.
- 2021: Two Polkas, "Polka Killer" and "The Pencil Sharpener Polka", on "Dance With Me Stanley" , a radio show with DJ Stashu on WFMU.
- 2020: 'The Lost Chord' is part of Ergo Phizmiz' The Dimbola Mikado. In a related project, "Dum Fizz" is one of the remixes in Dimbola Mikado Remix Album
- 2020: A track, "Lowenji", on "Mindfulness for Jerkoffs" , a benefit cassette for WFMU.
- 2020: CD Anthology "BEDROOM CASSETTE MASTERS VOL. X", Clicks and Lost Notes (filter sequence) (from Jan 13, 1984)
Hear It!
- 2019: Kurt Gottschalk's cassette "Ostriches", MY DANCE THE SKULL, by the Jazz Kissingers
hear it!
- 2017: CD Anthology "BEDROOM CASSETTE MASTERS VOL. 9", LYR SEQ 01 (from Oct 12, 1986)
Hear It!
- 2016: CD Anthology by glomag "Confessions Remixes", The Mirror Cuts Deep - Unplugged
Hear It!
- 2016: Mamalama's recording "LIVE AT THE OLD DUTCH CHURCH" (hammered dulcimer, recorder, pianica, glockenspiel).
Hear It!
- 2014: WFMU's "Miniature Minotaur's Friday the 13th" : "Phoning it in", premium cut for Kurt Gottschalk's show. Voice synths, Tondo, Droneo, Autoharp, old tape.
- 2013: WFMU's "Miniature Minotaur's The 17-year Itch" : "Cicada's Truth", premium cut for Kurt Gottschalk's show. Cicada, SPEAR spectral editor.
- 2011: WFMU's "Interplanetary Remixes: WFMU reinterprets the music of Sun Ra" : "Rood of the Somoc", Door of the Cosmos remix featuring my iPhone apps Droneo, Tondo, and Ellipsynth.
- 2011: Mamalama's recording "THE WORLD OF COLOR AND LIGHT" (hammered dulcimer, magyar citera,recorder, pianica, bell lyre, kazoo).
Hear It!
- 2010: Mamalama's recording "WILLOWS AND WAVES" (hammered dulcimer, magyar citera,recorder, pianica).
Hear It!
- 2009: WFMU's RUNNING IN PLACE locked groove record,
Five short (1.8 sec) pieces, mostly Shepard tones.
- 2007: Ken Freedman's WFMU Premium: "60 second song contest",
"MacArthur's Park Minute", by the Jazz Kissingers
- 2006: JON CATLER, Pitch records, on "Sleeping Beauty"; hammered dulcimer
- 2005: CHAMBER, Pitch records, on "At the Tomb of Charles Ives"; hammered dulcimer
- 2005: ODYSSEUS, Pitch records, on "Polyphemus", autoharp
- 2003: "Sounds of the Northeast Freeform DJ", WFMU 2003 Premium; "Ultra Violets (short version)"
- 2002: Experimental Musical Instruments: the Later Years; "Software-o-phones (1994)." (Reissued from the original Cassette)
- 1993: Cuneiform Records, Transforms:the Nerve Events Project; "Sublime Message"
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- Primordial Computer Art
- 1960s ▶
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- 1968-1969
Learning BASIC over a 110 baud direct dial-up line to Dartmouth College. Alfred Plant Junior High School (West Hartford, CT).
- 1966-197?
GENIAC!
Digi-Comp I
These great toy computers really changed my life.
- 1970s ▶
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- 1969-1974
Loomis Chaffee School, Windsor CT
DEC PDP/8e programming and hacking.
Wrote the language MUCAL, a FOCAL variant with an extension to play music via the "kluge harp" method of placing an AM radio near the machine while running a tight loop.
I also wrote such things as a symbolic disassembler (it read tapes of other programs and made up mnemonic names based on how each storage location was used), and an n-body gravity simulation program, which showed its results by printing "image frames" on the teletype.
- 1974-1980
Trinity College, Hartford CT:
Working on a PDP/8 and PDP/11, Altair, and school-built 8008 microcomputer (picture shows me in a striped sweater hunched over the Altair, PDP in background. Other hacker: Fred Borgenicht '79.)
I wrote drivers and graphic software that turned an analog HP plotter into a digital one (front ended by the Altair). Here is an example of that plotter art: a local space warping 3D Warnock renderer.

Raster imagery on a Diablo daisy-wheel printer featuring Phong shading and Catmull bump mapping.
I also started doing Gel Slide Sandwiches as a project for my Advanced Art class.
I graduated from Trinity in 1980 with a BA in Computer Science Coordinated with English. I was one of two students graduated with this degree the first time it was established.
- 1980s ▶
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- 1980-1988
Information Builders:
I took over the graphics programming and maintenance in 1980; but also spent a lot of time playing with the HP7220 and HP7221 plotters, driven by programs on the trusty Intertec SuperBrain. I did one or two of the FOCUS 4GL Manual covers using this setup!
other research with the SuperBrain and HP7220 plotter:
contour drawing of arbitrary fractal landscape functions.

Contour slices of a fractal landscape (color added by hand)
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- Software in the service of art
Amiga, NeXT, SGI, Linux, Mac (OS 6 .. 11.1), iOS, Perl, PHP, Python, Java, C, Objective C, FORTH and more.
- Interesting HTML5 software ▶
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- The Tone Spiral: nice way to compare and play transposed sections of the harmonic series.
- The Lost Chord: a little interactive essay about the mystical "Lost Chords".
- Interesting iOS software ▶
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There's a big section of this website about these apps here
- Droning and generative music:
SrutiBox, Droneo, Tondo, Wind Chimes, Ellipsynth, Enumero, Minute
- Playable Instruments:
synthicity itself, Ellipsynth, Lake Piano, AUMI, PolyHarp
- Thought Experiments: Banshee, Yes Session, Enumero, Only A, Minute, Andymatic Zingatron
- Unreleased and in development but who knows: Radiau, Fortuna Tuner, See Hear, Atomusic, Schwa, Dronau, Leskaupett, Probabilty control, All the News That's Fit To Fake, I Am Sitting In A Room, Hexelcior, Life Studies
- Interesting Amiga software ▶
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Read about some of these in this article
- RGS - Realtime Graphical Synthesizer: instantly creates sound by painting its spectrogram.
- BITE - Audio travesty program: develops a crude grammar for audio, then generates sound using the grammar.
- LYR - MIDI autoharp simulation program, with sequencer and extensions for other stringed instruments.
- HARM - audio effects program: Harmonizes, slows down, retriggers sound in real time.
- BUZZ - 8 voice audio synthesis daemon. Commands can be sent to configure and control digital synthesis patches.
- 8PUS - simple eight voice MIDI controlled audio synthesizer.
- WINK - more complicated eight voice MIDI controlled synthesizer.
- FRAX - script controlled visual text blending and display program.
- VAPOR PAINT - drawing and animation program. All drawing gestures on an infinite plane are stored and used to drive pen functions to create animated drawings. This is a more technical overview of Vapor Paint
- EE - Tuning language for tuning different microtonal synthesizers.
- Interesting NeXT software ▶
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- LPCView2 - an upgraded and fixed up version of LPCView, it allows one to draw and revise Linear Predictive Code parameters to synthesize audio.
- Interesting Internet Software ▶
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- Various features of www.wfmu.org: the online catalog system, the "Crackpot / Visionary Card-of-the-day," the "Sound of the Day", the Candy Valentine Heart server, the Old Codger's Almanac, many Marathon pledging scripts, playlists and the amazing Internet Museum of Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity Recordings" .
http://www.wfmu.org
The Internet Museum of Flexi/Cardboard/Oddity Recordings
- The Internet Synthesizer - which simulates an analog synthesizer via an HTML form and its own digital audio synthesis language.
Originally developed on a NeXT, it's been ported to SGI Irix, PC (NT), Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X.
http://www.wfmu.org/~jhhl/sinth.html
http://www.echonyc.com/~jhhl/sinth.html
- Blips - Dynamic VRML creator : jumbles up oddly shaped objects and links to a stock, yet cryptic phrases drawn in my own randomly warped typeface.
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- Dubious Firsts ▶
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As far as I know, I was the first to do these things:
- For the first show at Mission Graphics Support in the East Village, NYC, of a new kind of art by Sandra Filippucci, I coined the term DIGITAL MONOTYPE. Art historians, take note! (1987)
- First commercially released recording with spectrally encoded messages as images - "Sublime message" 1992, "Transforms: The Nerve Event Project", released 1993
- First gopher based webcam (1993)
- First audio travesty program (Sound BITE)
- First lock groove LP Shepard tone recordings (WFMU'S RUNNING IN PLACE) (2009)
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- Software in the service of money ▶
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- 2016: Stationhead, Inc. : iOs Programmer
- 2015: Exago, Inc. : Programmer
- 2012-2014: Medidata Solutions : Senior Mobile Programmer
I was Medidata's first Mobile programmer, working on their first mobile app, "Patient Cloud", an iPhone-based EPRO (Electronic Patient Reported Outcome) diary.
Medidata is BDD/TDD and Agile oriented, and many techniques were adapted to fit iOS programming into that methodology.
- 2007- : iPhone Apps : lots of iPhone apps, mostly audio based. I did one of the first branded radio streaming apps for WFMU: Here's a blog entry about it.
- 2008- : eSommelier.net : Independent consultant work, building a web interface for customer support, API testing modules, etc.
- 2005-2008 : Send Word Now (SWN Communications Inc.)
Senior Programmer / Core Architecture Team Lead.
I maintained and enhanced the XMS based email processing system, enabling it to be able to report back bounce data from SMTP errors, vacation notices, and other kinds of automatic and unanticipated responses. In the course of these enhancements, I extended the XMS program itself in Java. I also developed the UI enhancements that showed these status messages, and added searching features to organize the sent message details. I also designed a test SMTP server for exercising the email system, as well automated routines to generate the large number of different error messages that the server needed to handle.
I wrote Windows services that create and queue messages automatically from incoming alerts.
I wrote Web services, both producer and consumer, for creating messages and updating contact information via file transfer.
This programming involved a lot of XML processing, validation and specification.
- 1999-2003: Cisco Systems
1999-1999: Webline Communications
1997-1999: ErgoTech / G2X
I developed and maintained a web-interfaced email filtering - distribution - tracking - responding server, part of the "Cisco E-Mail Manager Option", a component of Cisco ICM. As you can surmise, it and I were acquired twice in 1999.
- 1994-1997: Various independent things:
STiM Magazine: the "Fax Bomb" feature: Fax in a picture in response to a contest on the web, and the response appears on a web page.
France Telecom: A refined version of Fax Bomb, which further organized the faxes so they could be claimed or distributed.
France Telecom: Designing and building a VRML model from its CAD representation using custom conversion and editing software.
- 1980-1993: Information Builders, Inc.
I created and maintained many features of the 4GL language FOCUS: the Graphics, Modify, FIDEL, FOCEXEC language, HLI, Modify and HLI SU, all on IBM Mainframes running CMS or MVS, and also was on the Macintosh port project from 1989-1993.
- Resumes
- Visit the comprehensive resumes page.
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- Websites
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- Blogs
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© 2004-2023 Henry Lowengard. background photo by Steven Salmieri, April 2004
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