Today we’d like to introduce you to Cody Hunt.
Cody, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have felt the need to express myself through art since I was very young. I grew up in a supportive household but was limited by religious dogma and a very large, not very well to do family. Differing opinions about life and the meaning that can be found within it were apparent very early as well. Not being able to communicate what I was thinking and feeling clearly, comfortably, or without fear of repercussions, I turned to songwriting as a form of expressing these more difficult emotions. This became a sort of escape from what I thought was “normal life” and eventually became a tool to redefine what “normal life” meant to me. I will forever be grateful to music for that gift. Simultaneously, I was in every performing arts class & club that my schools had to offer. Being in front of an audience was the main drive for me in my high school days. I did everything I could to perform as much as possible, which lead me down two main roads. Speech & debate was a large part of my life. I competed at every in state and national tournament I was able to, leading to winning five state championships, (the most held by one person in the history of Dobson High School). We were always trying to bend the rules for the sake of offering something new or more interactive, that was always our goal. The second road was exactly the opposite of the uniformly structured, rule book ran world of speech & debate. Friday Night Live was a twice a year sketch comedy show that was run, written, & produced by students with hardly no facilitator oversight. This gave us total creative control and threw us into the “sink or swim” realm of production. I have continued to create with some of my fellow “F.N.Lers” to this day!
I ended up dropping out of high school my senior year due to health and housing issues and went on to help start a film production crew with some fellow “F.N.L.ers” which grew into my close friend Sean Oliver’s company Third Productions. We started making a web series in 2010 called Lucidity The Web Saga, an epic about two roommates who share one another’s dreams unless they are lucid, forcing them to gain control of their awareness while they sleep to figure out what was actually causing their “superconscious” connection. The show went on for about four years and I did everything from makeup/costumes, set design, and making props to cinematography, audio, and digital effects. My whole creative process existed around the idea of making anything work with whatever we had to use. Lucidity was basically our film school. We had the privilege of going to the L.A. Web Festival for three years in a row where they generously gave out a handful of awards to our show every year. While I wasn’t making lucidity, I was throwing parties. Parties were my excuse for performances. I would set up spaces with wacky deco causing people to interact with their environment. One of my favorites was a long hallway in one of the spaces that we filled with streamers hanging from the ceiling so dense that it was hard to see, you had to kind of push your way through. The fun part was that we lined the floor with extra-large bubble wrap so as people walked they were causing a ton of noise. It was super fun! We had absolutely no funding for any of the things we were doing, especially these party events so they would range from places like one of the homies houses to abandoned complexes. I was always trying to attach some sort of interactive performance to these events because I have a need to perform and immersive performance can create such an unforgettable experience. Some of these events lead to some of the greatest nights of all time, whereas some of them led to me grabbing projectors and laptops, then running from the cops. Nothing is more stressful than an impromptu deinstall where if you’re too fast you could destroy the little equipment that you own and if you’re too slow you go to jail.
I started getting tired of the hassle and stress that came with these underground parties and I focused on the films. Third Productions started doing short film challenges through IFP and getting to know the local film community. This was an exciting time because we felt like every short film got better and better in content and quality! After about three years of short film festivals, one of our shorts was selected for the Hoboken Film Festival and we did a crowd funder to send three of us to New York where we screened with some amazing shorts. After that, we found online that Danny Elfman was doing a film challenge. He created four pieces of music, we had to pick one and create a five-minute film that we had like 5 months or something to produce. We ended up getting selected as one of the few shorts to screen with Danny Elfman at the L.A Film Festival!
All while this was happening, I was getting deep into live video augmentation. I fell in love with node-based programming languages and started creating v.j. shows for bands around town out of live footage of them. I traveled on an in-state tour around Arizona with some friends of mine and their band Harrison Fjord doing projection-mapped live video augmentation at their shows. Mixing footage of them melting and splitting into watercolors with pages out of Be Here Now by Ram Dass. I ended up creating a show for local phoenix band, Captain Squeegee that included live actors “taking over” the band’s show through the projections. the band ultimately had to fight off the “digital bad guys” with their music! This was a specifically challenging show because of how last minute is was and the fact that it was in Colorado. I coded 24 different scenes in a nonstop period of about 32 hours including plane time, set up our little performers cockpit on the second story of the venue when we arrived and our rehearsal was the performance. I was starting to realize that I didn’t want to do shows for bands as much as I wanted to create installation art and get back to a focus on interactivity. This was what lead me to build my first digital, audio/video theremin that you could augment a live feed of yourself using an xbox Kinect.
Everything from this point on had a focus on controllability, sound, movement, spacial positioning, and using a space to our advantage to create a unique experience. My creative partner, Angel Olmos hooked me up with an event called Ancient Future where we wanted to make the installation work back to an old base, immersive theater. I wanted to play with the idea of the “audience” being characters and turning them into “players”. So we created a bunch of small, easy to accomplish “quests” encouraging people to be silly and go dance with a stranger or something. The goal always being not only to give experience but to also encourage more interaction between event-goers. Working this event is how I first found Unexpected Art Gallery! Ben, the guy who was running the gallery at the time, but fazing out, introduced me to Chelsea who ended up giving me a job there. This is very important because it was my short time with Unexpected that allowed me to meet and work with Mikey Butzine!
Mikey and I became distant acquaintances, always supporting one another’s art through shares and likes mostly. Every now and then Mikey would turn me on to someone looking for projection mapping work and we would cross paths. It was at one of these events that I met Meesh Meyer, who became another acquaintance. About a year after that Mikey brought me onto a build crew for the Illuminations LED holiday installation and our relationship completely changed. After working for a few weeks on LEDs Meesh and Mikey asked me to help with creating a huge LED rainbow installation for an event that Meesh’s company SnoodCity was working on. I loved working with them and we have been working together ever since on events like Pot of Gold, Sip Fest, Phoenix Lights, and more! This festival work has helped take me to a myriad of events like the underground, Pagan focused desert event called Walpurgisnacht in San Diego to the strange and rugged, Bombay Beach Biennale, and of course, Burning Man, where I help run the Furnature Car Rally Camp! Working with Mikey and Meesh through SnoodCity has allowed me to focus more on creating immersive, a game like experiences, and we are currently working on getting a full scale “game” off the ground at one of these future events! I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Meesh because she encouraged me to start, and has helped me in the process of getting my LLC off the ground this last year! Cheeky Cholla is a brand new company focusing on narrative-driven immersive experiences in the world of installation art. You can see our first event in the form of The Dusty Rustlers Stunt Shows at the upcoming Relentless Beats event, Goldrush!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I have been told smooth roads exist, though I have yet to find one. My entire journey has been one long uphill battle that I am honestly very grateful for. It is the challenges I face that has molded me into the versatile artist that I am! I grew up the youngest of six and the only boy. I grew up in South Phoenix where my parents were able to keep a roof over our heads. In 8th grade, I was diagnosed with ocular migraines after what we thought was a stroke and then a dozen visits to the doctor/neurologist. Though I have found ways to help with these migraines, I still have a headache every day.
The summer before my sophomore year in high school my parents got divorced. My mom married her boss and moved to Queen Creek while my dad started dating his future wife who lives in Safford. I was home alone a lot that year. Once my dad married his now wife and decided to move to Safford with her, I was given the choice to move to one of two small towns. I didn’t want to move high schools since those schools had virtually no arts programs, so I decided to move to Queen Creek and commute to school. Being as involved with clubs as I was, I wouldn’t get home until around 10/11pm then homework for three hours then a few hours of sleep then waking up early to make the drive back to school. One day, I fell asleep on the way to school and almost ran off a construction break in the off-ramp I was on. I called my mom and told her that I wasn’t coming home again. I spent the rest of my days in school completely homeless other than the occasional crash as a friends house and a few homies parents letting me stay for longer terms. Other than that, I was on the street. I slept on a lot of roofs, mainly the stage roof of my high school that I had managed to get a bed and a couch onto, complete with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree during the holiday seasons. When I couldn’t find safe houses or warm air conditioning units to sleep under, I would find abandoned couches in alleyways and such. I learned to stay away from train tracks and spots that looked to set up and good to be true. Both of those were places that I experienced violent sexual assaults, one leading to a mild concussion and a broken 17-year-old. It took me a long time to heal and let my defenses down after that.
Bad choices, civil disobedience, and a broken judicial system had me in and out of tent city and the downtown jail a number of times. This had varying effects from being published on the home page of the Phoenix New Times website, kneeling in front of 200 swat team members holding an American flag and then getting beaten and arrested with the 53 or so members of the first Occupy Phoenix Protests to getting my license completely revoked by the state.
It took me a long time to change my outlook from pessimism to a realist optimism but I feel like it is the difficulties that I have encountered that have allowed me to maintain a sense of humor and humility in my artwork.
What do you do, what do you specialize in, what are you known for, etc. What are you most proud of as a company? What sets you apart from others?
I specialize in interactive, augmented live feed, visual graphics & immersive design. I am particularly known for my ability to see the whole picture and making sure things get done with what I have. I think what sets me apart from others is my ideas about community and habit building. I focus much of my energy towards the idea of shifting culture by shifting consciousness. I believe that immersive design can help accomplish that by creating a precedent of being rewarded for interacting with those around you. The more people are rewarded for interacting, the more those same people are going to interact, and in turn, the community gets stronger! I have watched others run with this idea without me after I shared it with them and seen them completely miss the mark, which is sad but usually very obvious why it didn’t work. I have a very clear idea in my head about how to facilitate this kind of culture shift through immersive design and I only hope that it will create as much impact as I think it can!
What are your plans for the future?
I am focusing on learning as much as I can about how to run my LLC so that we can bring bigger and better installations and immersive performance to the community! The next big change I am planning for is transitioning from scrapping by with my art to making a good living. I have worked very hard to get to where I am, and I can feel that bit of change coming soon. Until then, I am going to keep putting everything I have into my art with the help of my creative partners and the good graces of my friends and family! This next festival season is sure to be fun and inspiring as well as challenging and growth worthy. I’m looking forward to all of it, especially the nitty-gritty parts!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.cheekycholla.com
- Phone: 4807891220
- Email: cheekycholla@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/codyseehunt
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CodySeeHunt
- Other: www.instagram.com/cheekycholla
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