Budman Studios / Space Post Labs
Technical Director of Jim Budman's Venice Beach art-patronage foundation and the Space Post Labs STEAM accelerator — bringing VR, AR, and AI to the artists making the culture.
Budman Studios is where I learned that the best technology disappears into culture. Jim Budman had spent thirty years building something rare in Venice Beach — an art-patronage foundation where graffiti artists worked alongside AR developers, gallery curators alongside machine learning engineers, community health workers alongside interaction designers. People who were never supposed to be in the same room, in the same room. I came in as Technical Director, bringing VR, AR, and AI to the artists the foundation supported — the "A" for art built right into the science.
The projects ranged widely — Snapchat AR filters, Google collaborations, events with Snoop Dogg — but the through-line never changed: put powerful tools in the hands of creative people, then get out of the way. When LACMA's curators produced Beyond the Streets (a forty-thousand-square-foot special exhibition, the closest thing street art has to an Olympics, far bigger than an ordinary gallery show), we did the technology, scanning the entire production in 3D. And the Venice Family Clinic partnership showed what that same creative energy could do when you pointed it at community health.
Space Post Labs grew out of this ecosystem — the STEAM accelerator I ran alongside the foundation, a maker space that became home to the Crow Language project, bio-monitoring experiments, and a handful of community science initiatives that needed somewhere to happen. Venice has a forty-year habit of exactly this: art and technology colliding within walking distance, because proximity is what makes collaboration possible in the first place.
The studio is quiet now, but it settled something I carry into every project since. The garage is still the most powerful institution in technology — small teams, real problems, no permission needed. Every open, community-run thing I've built since is a descendant of that room, and of what Jim understood before I did: the tools only matter once you hand them to someone who has something to say.