Brad Gallagher's practice revolves around writing, coding, sound and new media with a focus on how computation intersects these different mediums. He has had a lifelong interest in how simple rules give rise to complex behavior, how order arises from chaos and how systems with many interacting parts exhibit self-organization. As an artist he draws inspiration from and directly leverages these principles to create interactive, dynamic, and emergent content. He reflects these practices back into traditional writing, creating a feedback loop of influence amongst the mediums of his work. He graduated with a BFAW from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in May 2019.
He has most recently performed sound-triggered, generative, text pieces at the Electronic Literature Organization event hosted by the School of The Art Institute of Chicago in conjunction with the 2019 MLA conference, the Red Rover Reading Series in Chicago, and the 2019 &Now Festival at the University of Washington at Bothell.
He has recorded two full length records ( Bosco & Jorge , 2000, Ally in the Sky , 2001), an EP ( Good Times, Bad Times, Right Times, Wrong Times ), two seven-inch records and curated a re-mix record with his band Bosco & Jorge in the early to mid-2000s. His more recent recordings are an album based around the mouth harp called Unicorn Chasers with the group SWCK in 2011 and a project recorded in Northern Ireland called Missed Flights and Fist Fights in 2015.
He previously worked at the University of Chicago Center for Thermonuclear Flashes (now the Flash Center for Computation) where he worked in high performance parallel computing and scientific visualization. His work in scientific visualization has appeared in many scientific and popular publications such as the IBM Research Journal, Forbes magazine and Wired magazine, where it was voted as one of the best scientific visualizations of 2009. His visualizations of Type 1a Supernovae were featured on the History Channel 鈥淭he Universe Series.鈥�