Tom Beddard

Born in 1976 in London but grew up just outside Manchester. Studied physics at Nottingham University and then moved to Scotland to do a PhD in laser physics at the University of St Andrews.

After finishing my PhD the booming world of the dot com internet was more appealing than academia and so I became a web developer specialising in ecommerce and content management systems. For the past eleven years I have worked as a web developer for a variety of agencies in Scotland.

I currently live just outside Edinburgh and now run my own business Hyper Digital Ltd.

Personal Work

Statement

I have a fascination with the aesthetics of detail and complexity that is the result of simple mathematical or algorithmic processes. For me the creative process is writing my own software and scripts to explore the resulting output in an interactive manner. The best outcomes are often the least expected!

Book & magazine contributions

Aug 2011: Scientific American
Feb 2011: Investigación y Ciencia
Sept 2010: Pour La Science
April 2010: Spektrum Der Widdenschaft

Industry of Nature: Another Approach to Ecology - Elodie Ternaux
Science in the Age of Computer Simulation - Eric Winsberg (book cover)
Generative Art - Matt Pearson
Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information - Manuel Lima

Film screenings

Nov 2011: Onedotzero Adventures in Motion 2011. London, UK
Aug 2011: GENERATOR projects. Dundee, UK
May 2011: Drift Station. Nebraska, USA
May 2011: VisueIt. Oslo, Norway
April 2011: Synthetic Cinema. Belgrade, Serbia
April 2011: Space Odyssey 2011. Kiev, Ukraine
Mar 2011: Times Square. New York, US
Jan 2011: Galerija Photon. Lijubljana, Slovenia
Sept 2010: Alpha-ville Festival. London, UK
May 2010: Cronosfera Project "Visions from the future" Iridescent Worlds 2010. Torino, Italy

Commissions

Animations for a 147 screen installation at L'Eclaireur.
Two pieces for AOL's 2011 artists programme.
After Effects plugin for Ghost Town Media used for the Linkin Park 2010 Concert Tour.

Interviews

Dec 2011: A.N.D
Mar 2011: suckerPUNCH
Feb 2011: smidgy.com
Jan 2011: fastcodesign.com

Talks

May 2009: Fractals and Generative Art. Apple Store, Glasgow
May 2008: Digital Marketing. Scottish Further Education Unit, Stirling
April 2008: Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret! Scotland on Rails, Edinburgh

Professional Work

Employment

July 2011 - present: Founder of Hyper Digital Ltd. The business side of subblue.com

June 2010 - June 2011: Senior Developer, 55 Degrees. Headed up the software team for the Riverside Museum, the new £74 million museum of transport in Glasgow. We created over 100 video and interactive exhibits as well as the system software to manage everything.

2006 - 2010: Technical Director, tictoc family. Developed content management systems and bespoke web applications using Ruby on Rails now used for over 150 clients.

2001 - 2006: Head Developer, Become Interactive. Designed and developed bespoke PHP based e-commerce and content managed websites.

Previous Clients

A selection of companies and organisations I have worked with over the years:

Bank of Scotland, Children’s Workforce Development Council, d2 Jeans, Forth Valley College, guitar.co.uk, lastorders.com, phpBB, Royal Yacht Britannia, St Helens Chamber, teetonic.com, tiso.com, University of Edinburgh, University of St Andrews, Warner Bros.